Download or read book Literature Language and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain 1680 1820 written by Robin Valenza and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.
Download or read book Keats s Negative Capability written by Brian Rejack and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few critical terms coined by poets are more famous than “negative capability.” Though Keats uses the mysterious term only once, a consensus about its meaning has taken shape over the last two centuries. Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives offers alternative ways to approach and understand Keats’s seductive term.
Download or read book Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth Century British Novel written by Lauren Gillingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.
Download or read book Reading Popular Newtonianism written by Laura Miller and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Isaac Newton’s publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Concepts such as attraction and extrapolation—detailed in his landmark monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—found their way into both scientific and cultural discourse. Understanding the trajectory of Newton’s diverse critical and popular reception in print demands consideration of how his ideas were disseminated in a marketplace comprised of readers with varying levels of interest and expertise. Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading. Informed by sustained archival work and multiple critical approaches, Laura Miller asserts that print facilitated the mainstreaming of Newton's ideas. In addition to his reading habits and his manipulation of print conventions in the Principia, Miller analyzes the implied readership of various "popularizations" as well as readers traced through the New York Society Library's borrowing records. Many of the works considered—including encyclopedias, poems, and a work written "for the ladies"—are not scientifically innovative but are essential to eighteenth-century readers’ engagement with Newtonian ideas. Revising the timeline in which Newton’s scientific ideas entered eighteenth-century culture, Reading Popular Newtonianism is the first book to interrogate at length the importance of print to his consequential career.
Download or read book The Testimony of Sense written by Tim Milnes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Testimony of Sense attempts to answer a neglected but important question: what became of epistemology in the late eighteenth century, in the period between Hume's scepticism and Romantic idealism? It finds that two factors in particular reshaped the nature of 'empiricism': the socialisation of experience by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and the impact upon philosophical discourse of the belletrism of periodical culture. The book aims to correct the still widely-held assumption that Hume effectively silenced epistemological inquiry in Britain for over half a century. Instead, it argues that Hume encouraged the abandonment of subject-centred reason in favour of models of rationality based upon the performance of trusting actions within society. Of particular interest here is the way in which, after Hume, fundamental ideas like the self, truth, and meaning are conceived less in terms of introspection, correspondence, and reference, and more in terms of community, coherence, and communication. By tracing the idea of intersubjectivity through the issues of trust, testimony, virtue and language, the study offers new perspectives on the relationships between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism. As philosophy grew more conversational, the familiar essay became a powerful metaphor for new forms of communication. The book explores what is epistemologically at stake in the familiar essay genre as it develops through the writings of Joseph Addison, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. It also offers readings of philosophical texts, such as Hume's Treatise, Thomas Reid's Inquiry, and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, as literary performances.
Download or read book Distraction written by Natalie M. Phillips and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Attention: An fMRI Study of Reading Jane Austen
Download or read book Romantic Art in Practice written by Thora Brylowe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the developing cultural tensions and connections that created a 'sister-art' movement between creative visual art and its literary counterparts.
Download or read book The Poetic Enlightenment written by Rowan Boyson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this edited collection look at the role of poetry in the development of Enlightenment ideas. As scholarly disciplines began to emerge – anthropology, linguistics, psychology – the ancient art of poetry was invoked to create new ways of defining and expanding this philosophy of human science.
Download or read book The Experimental Imagination written by Tita Chico and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.
Download or read book Living as an Author in the Romantic Period written by Matthew Sangster and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-27 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors’ interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.
Download or read book Literature After Euclid written by Matthew Wickman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature After Euclid tells the story of the creative adaptation of geometry in Scotland during and after the long eighteenth century. Analyzing the work of Scottish literati, Matthew Wickman challenges how we perceive the Scottish Enlightenment and the modernist ethos that relegated "classical" Enlightenment to the dustbin of history.
Download or read book Conversable Worlds written by Jon Mee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversable Worlds addresses the emergence of the idea of 'the conversation of culture'. Around 1700 a new commercial society was emerging that thought of its values as the product of exchanges between citizens. Conversation became increasingly important as a model and as a practice for how community could be created. A welter of publications, in periodical essays, in novels, and in poetry, enjoined the virtues of conversation. These publications were enthusiastically read and discussed in book clubs and literary societies that created their own conversable worlds. From some perspectives, the freedom of a distinctively English conversation allowed for the 'collision' of ideas and sentiments. For others, like Joseph Addison and David Hume, ease of 'flow' was the key issue, and politeness the means of establishing a via media. For Addison and Hume, the feminization of culture promised to make women the sovereigns of what Hume called 'the conversable world'. As the culture seemed to open up to a multitude of voices, anxieties appeared as to how far things should be allowed to go. The unruliness of the crowd threatened to disrupt the channels of communication. There was a parallel fear that mere feminized chatter might replace learning. This book examines the influence of these developments on the idea of literature from 1762 through to 1830. Part I examines the conversational paradigm established by figures like Addison and Hume, and the proliferation of conversable worlds into gatherings like Johnson's Club and Montagu's Bluestocking assemblies. Part II looks at the transition from the eighteenth century to 'Romantic' ideas of literary culture, the question of the withdrawal from mixed social space, the drive to sublimate verbal exchange into forms that retained dialogue without contention in places like Coleridge's 'conversation poems,' and the continuing tensions between ideas of the republic of letters as a space of vigorous exchange as opposed to the organic unfolding of consciousness.
Download or read book Writing STEAM written by Vivian Kao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection positions writing at the center of interdisciplinary higher education, and explores how writing instruction, writing scholarship, and writing program administration bring STEM and the humanities together in meaningful, creative, and beneficial ways. Writing professionals are at the forefront of a cross-pollination between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the arts and humanities. In their work as educators, scholars, and administrators, they collaborate with colleagues in engineering, scientific, technical, and health disciplines, offer new degree programs that allow students to bring the humanities to bear on design experiments, and build an academic culture that promotes a vision of the humanities in the twenty-first century, as well as a vision of technology that is decidedly human. This collection surveys and promotes that work through chapters focused on writing instruction, writing scholarship, and writing program administration, covering topics that include data-driven writing courses, public science communication, non-traditional college students, creative writing, gamification, skills transfer, and Writing Across the Curriculum programs. Writing STEAM will be essential reading for scholars, instructors, and administrators in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, STEM, and a variety of interdisciplinary programs; it will aid in teacher training for both humanities and STEM courses focused on writing and communication.
Download or read book Science Form and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism written by Dahlia Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring a topic at the intersection of science, philosophy and literature in the late eighteenth century Dahlia Porter traces the history of induction as a writerly practice - as a procedure for manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - from its roots in Francis Bacon's experimental philosophy to its pervasiveness across Enlightenment moral philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and literature itself. Porter brings this history to bear on an omnipresent feature of Romantic-era literature, its mixtures of verse and prose. Combining analyses of printed books and manuscripts with recent scholarship in the history of science, she elucidates the compositional practices and formal dilemmas of Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In doing so she re-examines the relationship between Romantic literature and eighteenth-century empiricist science, philosophy, and forms of art and explores how Romantic writers engaged with the ideas of Enlightenment empiricism in their work.
Download or read book Pathologies of Motion written by Kevis Goodman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous "motions" within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art's shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period's exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Manners of Reading written by Eve Tavor Bannet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse, but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.
Download or read book The Invention of English Criticism written by Michael Gavin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early literary criticism was undisciplined. Unlike the staid essays and monographs of later academic scholarship, English criticism first appeared in the contentious world of the London theater: dramatists and other poets argued about their craft in contending prefaces and dedications, and their disputes spilled into the public sphere in pamphlet wars, mock epics, lampoons, and even novels. Across these forms, criticism was personal, political, and unconcerned with analysis for its own sake. Yet this unruly discourse laid the groundwork both for modern literary criticism and for the discipline of literary studies. The Invention of English Criticism explores the earliest uses of criticism and the attempts by some to convert a field of literary debate into an archive of useful knowledge. Criticism's undisciplined past thus illuminates its contested, ambivalent, and never fully disciplined present.
