Open Fields
Science in Cultural Encounter
1st Edition
Published on 28. March 1996
352 pages
978-0-19-163852-7 (ISBN)
Description
Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth- century writing Gillian Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of chance, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of essays centres on Darwin and the incentives of his thinking, from language theory to his encounters with Fuegians. Other essays include Hardy, Helmholtz, Hopkins, Clerk Maxwell, and Woolf. The collection throws a different light on Victorian experience and the rise of modernism, and engages with current controversies about the place of science in culture.
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03/1999
Clarendon Press
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Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyirght
- Preface
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction
- I. DARWINIAN ENCOUNTERS
- 1. Four Bodies on the Beagle: Touch, Sight, and Writing in a Darwin Letter
- 2. Can the Native Return?
- 3· Travelling the Other Way: Travel Narratives and Truth Claims
- 4· Speaking for the Others: Relativism and Authority in Victorian Anthropological Writing
- 5· Darwin and the Growth of Language Theory
- 6. Forging the Missing Link: Interdisciplinary Stories
- II. DESCRIPTION AND ALLUSION IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING
- 7· Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery
- 8. Translation or Transformation? The Relation of Literature and Science
- 9· Parable, Professionalization, and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing
- III. VICTORIAN PHYSICS AND FUTURES
- 10. 'The Death of the Sun': Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Theory
- 11. Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination
- 12. The Reader's Wager: Lots, Sorts, and Futures
- 13· Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism
- IV. CODA
- 14· Square Rounds and Other Awkward Fits: Chemistry as Theatre
- Index
