Download or read book Some Aspects of Pseudo sciences in Nineteenth Century American Literature written by Francis W. Weeks and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pseudo science and Society in Nineteenth century America written by Arthur Wrobel and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th century was the golden age of many things, and pseudo-science was one of them. Nowhere was this more obviously the case than in America. If he shopped around, a 19th-century American could consult a psychographer or a hydropath or a magnetizer(in 1843, there were supposed to be more than 200 magnetizers - practitioners of mesmerism -in Boston alone). As soon as he had taken off his water girdle, he was free to put on his Heidelberg Electric Belt, and perhaps smoke an electric cigarette. He could read pamphlets explaining why husbands and wives ought to have sex once every two years, on a sunny day in August or September, between 11 A.M. and noon. These are only a few of the topics touched on in ''Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America,'' a new collection of essays edited by Arthur Wrobel, a professor of American literature at the University of Kentucky. Mr. Wrobel and his fellow contributors trace the impact of most of the major pseudo-sciences of the period, and some of the minor ones; they look at them in the light of other 19th-century cultural developments, and try to set them in a specifically American context. Only one of the essays deals with an individual pseudo-scientist - Taylor Stoehr's absorbing account of Robert H. Collyer, a lecturer of the 1830's and 40's whose specialties included phrenology, mesmerism and painless dentistry (fairly painless, thanks to a combination of mesmerism, alcohol and opium). In due course, Collyer concocted a hybrid science of his own called phrenomagnetism, which enabled him to detect a whole host of ''organs'' in the brain that orthodox phrenology had somehow missed - organs of Sarcasm, Love of Pets, Desire for Seeing Ancient Places and other specialized propensities. His final inspiration, which plainly owed something to the advent of photography, was psychography, a system of transferring mental images by bouncing them off a bowl of molasses.
Download or read book Pseudo Science and Society in 19th Century America written by Arthur Wrobel and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment. Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all. As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements. This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.
Download or read book Taming the Powers of the Air written by Kent Steven Simons and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Entranced America written by Mark Rickert and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hawthorne s Mad Scientists written by Taylor Stoehr and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Masters Essays written by Columbia University. Library and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays for the Master s Degree written by Columbia University. Libraries and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Children s Literature and the Rise of Mind Cure written by Anne Stiles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination into how the new religious movement known as New Thought or "mind cure" influenced fin-de-siècle Anglophone children's fiction.
Download or read book Science and Pseudo science Reprinted from The Nineteenth Century and After Vol CXLI Feb 1947 Pages 108 112 written by Lewis Merson Davies and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Strange Science written by Lara Pauline Karpenko and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at scientific inquiry during the Victorian period and the shifting boundary between mainstream and unorthodox sciences of the time
Download or read book Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology written by Michael S. Kearns and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Literature and Science written by Robert Scholnick and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and science are two disciplines are two disciplines often thought to be unrelated, if not actually antagonistic. But Robert J. Scholnick points out that these areas of learning, up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, "were understood as parts of a unitary endeavor." By mid-century they had diverged, but literature and science have continued to interact, conflict, and illuminate each other. In this innovative work, twelve leaders in this emerging interdisciplinary field explore the long engagement of American writers with science and uncover science's conflicting meanings as a central dimension of the nation's conception of itself. Reaching back to the Puritan poet-minister-physician Edward Taylor, who wrote at the beginning of the scientific revolution, and forward to Thomas Pynchon, novelist of the cybernetic age, this collection of original essays contains essential work on major writers, including Franklin, Jefferson, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hart Crane, Dos Passos, and Charles Olson. Through its exploration of the ways that American writers have found in science and technology a vital imaginative stimulus, even while resisting their destructive applications, this book points towards a reconciliation and integration within culture. An innovative look at a neglected dimension of our literary tradition, American Literature and Science stands as both a definition of the field and an invitation to others to continue and extend new modes of inquiry.
Download or read book Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne Melville Twain and James written by S. Halliday and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-06-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals the full extent of electricity's significance in Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century literature and culture. It provides in-depth coverage of a wide range of canonical American authors from the American Renaissance onwards. As well as many fascinating hitherto under-studied writers.
Download or read book Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century written by Anne Stiles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1860s and 1870s, leading neurologists used animal experimentation to establish that discrete sections of the brain regulate specific mental and physical functions. These discoveries had immediate medical benefits: David Ferrier's detailed cortical maps, for example, saved lives by helping surgeons locate brain tumors and haemorrhages without first opening up the skull. These experiments both incited controversy and stimulated creative thought, because they challenged the possibility of an extra-corporeal soul. This book examines the cultural impact of neurological experiments on late-Victorian Gothic romances by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells and others. Novels like Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde expressed the deep-seated fears and visionary possibilities suggested by cerebral localization research, and offered a corrective to the linearity and objectivity of late Victorian neurology.
Download or read book Handbook of American Romanticism written by Philipp Löffler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Plato s Ghost written by Cathy Gutierrez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its day, spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to séance tables and trance lectures. It has alternately been ridiculed as the apogee of fatuous credulity and hailed as a feminist movement. Its tricks have been exposed, its charlatans unmasked, and its heroes' names lost to posterity. In its day, however, its leaders were household names and politicians worried about capturing the Spiritualist vote. Cathy Gutierrez places Spiritualism in the context of the 19th-century American Renaissance. Although this epithet usually signifies the sudden blossoming of American letters, Gutierrez points to its original meaning: a cultural imagination enraptured with the past and the classics in particular, accompanied by a cultural efflorescence. Spiritualism, she contends, was the religious articulation of the American Renaissance, and the ramifications of looking backward for advice about the present were far-reaching. The Spiritualist movement, says Gutierrez, was a 'renaissance of the Renaissance,' a culture in love with history as much as it trumpeted progress and futurity, and an expression of what constituted religious hope among burgeoning technology and colonialism. Rejecting Christian ideas about salvation, Spiritualists embraced Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas. Humans were shot through with the divine, rather than seen as helpless and inexorably corrupt sinners in the hands of a transcendent, angry God. Gutierrez's study of this fascinating and important movement is organized thematically. She analyzes Spiritualist conceptions of memory, marriage, medicine, and minds, explores such phenomena as machines for contacting the dead, spirit-photography, the idea of eternal spiritual affinity (which implied the necessity for marriage reform), the connection between health and spirituality, and mesmerism.
