Histories of Science
Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
1st Edition
Published on 26. June 2025
366 pages
978-0-8139-5170-6 (ISBN)
Description
Spreading the news of scientific breakthroughs in the eighteenth century
Histories of Science shows how different forms of media communicated scientific breakthroughs during the long eighteenth century, bringing together eighteen humanities scholars to discuss the representation, reception, and application of natural philosophy in the Atlantic world. In particular, the authors focus on descriptions of scientific discoveries in popular print, with essays on topics as varied as placebo pills, irrigation systems, and navigational technology. And while each contributor advances a discrete argument, the collection coheres in its shared questions of methodology, historicity, and ethics. Histories of Science expands our record of the past, our understanding of the present, and our ability to imagine the future.
Histories of Science shows how different forms of media communicated scientific breakthroughs during the long eighteenth century, bringing together eighteen humanities scholars to discuss the representation, reception, and application of natural philosophy in the Atlantic world. In particular, the authors focus on descriptions of scientific discoveries in popular print, with essays on topics as varied as placebo pills, irrigation systems, and navigational technology. And while each contributor advances a discrete argument, the collection coheres in its shared questions of methodology, historicity, and ethics. Histories of Science expands our record of the past, our understanding of the present, and our ability to imagine the future.
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David Alff | Danielle Spratt
Histories of Science
Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Book
06/2025
University of Virginia Press
€137.90
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Histories of Science
Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Book
06/2025
University of Virginia Press
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Persons
David Alff is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and the author of The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region. Danielle Spratt is Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, and coauthor of Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice.
Content
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Rhetoric
- Science for the Birds: Figurative Language and The History of the Royal Society
- Centlivre's Frankenstein: Science, Authorship, and Monstrous (Re)Productions in A Bold Stroke for a Wife
- Picturing Air: The Rhetoric of Nondescription in Robert Boyle's New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year
- Romancing the Placebo
- Part II. Reception
- "The Eye of Mr. Anson Himself": Art and Evanescence in A Voyage Round the World (1748)
- Literary Technologies of the Sextant in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Newtonian Legacies in William Hogarth 's A Scene from "The Indian Emperour," or "The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards"
- "Fully Prov'd by the Plates": The Unauthorized System of J. T. Desaguliers
- Part III. Embodiment
- Plants, Principles, Strata: John Woodward's Improbable Corpuscles
- "Mice in a Barn" or "Every Little Miss"?: Figurative Imagination and Demographic Narratives of the Long Eighteenth Century
- Jane Barker and Virgin Anatomy
- Margaret Cavendish, a Sensitive Witness
- Maria Edgeworth's Avian Entwinements: Experimental Science and the Cultivation of the Female Mind in Practical Education and Belinda
- Part IV. Environment
- The Hoe and the Plow: Plantation Labor under the Somatic Energy Regime
- Infrastructural Inversion at Clarens: St. Preux in the Garden
- Taxonomic Subversion and Vegetal Expansion in Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head"
- Spicy Forests and Amboyna Burl: Dryden and the Ecology of Disaster
- Geomythography: A Genealogy
- Contributors
- Index
