Repositioning Victorian Sciences

Repositioning Victorian Sciences PDF Author: David Clifford
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
An intriguing look at the marginal sciences of the nineteenth century and their influence on the culture of the period.

Repositioning Victorian Sciences

Repositioning Victorian Sciences PDF Author: David Clifford
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
An intriguing look at the marginal sciences of the nineteenth century and their influence on the culture of the period.

Victorian Science and Literature, Part I Vol 1

Victorian Science and Literature, Part I Vol 1 PDF Author: Gowan Dawson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040243088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This eight-volume, reset edition in two parts collects rare primary sources on Victorian science, literature and culture. The sources cover both scientific writing that has an aesthetic component – what might be called 'the literature of science' – and more overtly literary texts that deal with scientific matters.

Victorian Science and Imagery

Victorian Science and Imagery PDF Author: Nancy Rose Marshall
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987996
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Equal Natures

Equal Natures PDF Author: Shalyn Claggett
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438493177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In Equal Natures, Shalyn Claggett argues that Victorian women writers used scientific understandings of the brain to challenge socially constructed forms of power and gender inequality. Focusing on phrenology—the first science of brain localization and the most popular science in nineteenth-century Britain—Claggett shows how these writers leveraged phrenology's premise that the seat of identity is innate rather than acquired to make new claims about women's intellectual abilities and psychological complexity. Whereas male scientists often used phrenology to support racist and colonialist agendas, in the hands of women, an appeal to biology became a tool of subversion. Through historically contextualized analyses of works by Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot, Equal Natures demonstrates how biology was used to contest conventional understandings of individual identity and interpersonal relations. In doing so, it counters a dominant assumption in feminist theory that essentialism has been the exclusive province of patriarchal values and reactionary political aims.

Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories

Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories PDF Author: Sandra H. Dudley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415692717
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the stories that can be told by and about objects and those who choose to collect them. Examining collecting in different historical, social and institutional contexts, the authors consider the meanings and values with which objects are imputed and the processes and implications of collecting.

Reassembling the Strange

Reassembling the Strange PDF Author: Thomas Anderson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498576060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book examines how Westerners understood and processed Madagascar and its environment during the nineteenth century. Madagascar’s unique ecosystem crafted its reputation as a strange place full of unusual species. Westerners, however, often minimized Madagascar’s peculiar features to stress the commonality of its fauna and flora with the world. The attempt to understand the island through science led to a domestication of its environment that created the image of a tame and known world capable of being controlled and used by Western powers. At the heart of the exploration of Madagascar and its transformation in Western eyes from a strange world to a cash crop colony were missionaries and naturalists who relied upon global experiences to master the island by normalizing the peculiar qualities of Madagascar’s environment. This book reveals how the environment played a dominant role in understanding the island and its people, and how current environmental debates have evolved from earlier policies and discussions about the environment.

Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines

Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines PDF Author: Martin Willis
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873388573
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.

The X Club

The X Club PDF Author: Ruth Barton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655175X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
In 1864, amid headline-grabbing heresy trials, members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were asked to sign a declaration affirming that science and scripture were in agreement. Many criticized the new test of orthodoxy; nine decided that collaborative action was required. The X Club tells their story. These six ambitious professionals and three wealthy amateurs—J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, John Lubbock, William Spottiswoode, Edward Frankland, George Busk, T. A. Hirst, and Herbert Spencer—wanted to guide the development of science and public opinion on issues where science impinged on daily life, religious belief, and politics. They formed a private dining club, which they named the X Club, to discuss and further their plans. As Ruth Barton shows, they had a clear objective: they wanted to promote “scientific habits of mind,” which they sought to do through lectures, journalism, and science education. They devoted enormous effort to the expansion of science education, with real, but mixed, success. ​For twenty years, the X Club was the most powerful network in Victorian science—the men succeeded each other in the presidency of the Royal Society for a dozen years. Barton’s group biography traces the roots of their success and the lasting effects of their championing of science against those who attempted to limit or control it, along the way shedding light on the social organization of science, the interactions of science and the state, and the places of science and scientific men in elite culture in the Victorian era.

Darwin-Inspired Learning

Darwin-Inspired Learning PDF Author: Carolyn J. Boulter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9462098336
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Charles Darwin has been extensively analysed and written about as a scientist, Victorian, father and husband. However, this is the first book to present a carefully thought out pedagogical approach to learning that is centered on Darwin’s life and scientific practice. The ways in which Darwin developed his scientific ideas, and their far reaching effects, continue to challenge and provoke contemporary teachers and learners, inspiring them to consider both how scientists work and how individual humans ‘read nature’. Darwin-inspired learning, as proposed in this international collection of essays, is an enquiry-based pedagogy, that takes the professional practice of Charles Darwin as its source. Without seeking to idealise the man, Darwin-inspired learning places importance on: • active learning • hands-on enquiry • critical thinking • creativity • argumentation • interdisciplinarity. In an increasingly urbanised world, first-hand observations of living plants and animals are becoming rarer. Indeed, some commentators suggest that such encounters are under threat and children are living in a time of ‘nature-deficit’. Darwin-inspired learning, with its focus on close observation and hands-on enquiry, seeks to re-engage children and young people with the living world through critical and creative thinking modeled on Darwin’s life and science.

Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy

Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy PDF Author: Brigid Lowe
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843317745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.