Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science PDF Download
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Author: Stella Pratt-Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317007816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.
Author: Stella Pratt-Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317007816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.
Author: John Holmes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.
Author: David Seed
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100089911X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
This volume presents a selection from the American and British fiction of the nineteenth century which was evolving into what we now know as science fiction. Taking Frankenstein as its formative work, it assembles stories and excerpts from narratives exploring the complex impact of new technologies like the telegraph and later the cinema, or new scientific practices like mesmerism (hypnotism) and microscopy. The selected authors range from those famous within the realist tradition like George Eliot and Mark Twain to scientists like the physician Silas Weir Mitchell and the inventor Thomas Edison. They repeatedly destabilize their narratives so that some come to resemble scientific records and frequently leave their endings unresolved, encouraging the reader to speculate about their subjects, which include extensions to the senses, new inventions, and challenges to individual autonomy. Many focus on experiments but might combine scientific enquiry with the supernatural, producing hybrid narratives as a result which are difficult to classify.
Author: Adam Roberts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110857159X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Book Description
Science fiction was being written throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it underwent a rapid expansion of cultural dissemination and popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This Element explores the ways this explosion in interest in 'scientific romance', that informs today's global science fiction culture, manifests the specific historical exigences of the revolutions in publishing and distribution technology. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and other science fiction writers embody in their art the advances in material culture that mobilize, reproduce and distribute with new rapidity, determining the cultural logic of twentieth-century science fiction in the process.
Author: Robert D. Hicks
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253070775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans—six soldiers and one physician—coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives. Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran's body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma. Through his research, he reveals the changing social circumstances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they impacted the traumatized veteran's body. This engaging book is equal parts Civil War history, disability and gender history, and the history of the body that discloses the impact of war on a wounded warrior.
Author: Richard F. Hirsh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521524711
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This book illuminates the role of technological stagnation in the decline of the American electric utility industry in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unlike other interpreters of the industry's woes, Professor Hirsh argues that a long and successful history of managing a conventional technology set the stage for the industry's deterioration. After improving steadily for decades, the technology that brought unequalled productivity growth to the industry appeared to stall in the late 1960s, making it impossible to mitigate the economic and regulatory assaults of the 1970s. Unfortunately, most managers did not recognize (or did not want to believe) the severity of the technological problems they faced, and they chose to focus instead on issues (usually financial or public relations) that appeared more manageable. Partly as a result of this lack of attention to technological issues, the industry found itself in the 1980s challenged by the prospects of deregulation and restructuring.
Author: Raymond Flood
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019164126X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 1428
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Book Description
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) had a relatively brief, but remarkable life, lived in his beloved rural home of Glenlair, and variously in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London and Cambridge. His scholarship also ranged wide - covering all the major aspects of Victorian natural philosophy. He was one of the most important mathematical physicists of all time, coming only after Newton and Einstein. In scientific terms his immortality is enshrined in electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations, but as this book shows, there was much more to Maxwell than electromagnetism, both in terms of his science and his wider life. Maxwell's life and contributions to science are so rich that they demand the expertise of a range of academics - physicists, mathematicians, and historians of science and literature - to do him justice. The various chapters will enable Maxwell to be seen from a range of perspectives. Chapters 1 to 4 deal with wider aspects of his life in time and place, at Aberdeen, King's College London and the Cavendish Laboratory. Chapters 5 to 12 go on to look in more detail at his wide ranging contributions to science: optics and colour, the dynamics of the rings of Saturn, kinetic theory, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism with the concluding chapters on Maxwell's poetry and Christian faith.
Author: Lasse Rosendahl
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0857097431
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The utilisation of biomass is increasingly important for low- or zero-carbon power generation. Developments in conventional power plant fuel flexibility allow for both direct biomass combustion and co-firing with fossil fuels, while the integration of advanced technologies facilitates conversion of a wide range of biomass feedstocks into more readily combustible fuel. Biomass combustion science, technology and engineering reviews the science and technology of biomass combustion, conversion and utilisation.Part one provides an introduction to biomass supply chains and feedstocks, and outlines the principles of biomass combustion for power generation. Chapters also describe the categorisation and preparation of biomass feedstocks for combustion and gasification. Part two goes on to explore biomass combustion and co-firing, including direct combustion of biomass, biomass co-firing and gasification, fast pyrolysis of biomass for the production of liquids and intermediate pyrolysis technologies. Largescale biomass combustion and biorefineries are then the focus of part three. Following an overview of large-scale biomass combustion plants, key engineering issues and plant operation are discussed, before the book concludes with a chapter looking at the role of biorefineries in increasing the value of the end-products of biomass conversion.With its distinguished editor and international team of expert contributors, Biomass combustion science, technology and engineering provides a clear overview of this important area for all power plant operators, industrial engineers, biomass researchers, process chemists and academics working in this field. - Reviews the science and technology of biomass combustion, conversion and utilisation - Provides an introduction to biomass supply chains and feedstocks and outlines the principles of biomass combustion for power generation - Describes the categorisation and preparation of biomass feedstocks for combustion and gasification
Author: Lynne Tatlock
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133083
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
"This volume examines the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the so-called long nineteenth century - the century of mass German migration to the new world, of industrialization and new technologies, American westward expansion and Civil War, German struggle toward national unity and civil rights, and increasing literacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America places its emphasis on the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. Informed by a conception of culture as multivalent, permeable, and protean, the book focuses on the mechanisms, agents, and means of mediation between cultural spaces."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Doron Galili
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478009225
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
Already in the late nineteenth century, electricians, physicists, and telegraph technicians dreamed of inventing televisual communication apparatuses that would “see” by electricity as a means of extending human perception. In Seeing by Electricity Doron Galili traces the early history of television, from fantastical image transmission devices initially imagined in the 1870s such as the Telectroscope, the Phantoscope, and the Distant Seer to the emergence of broadcast television in the 1930s. Galili examines how televisual technologies were understood in relation to film at different cultural moments—whether as a perfection of cinema, a threat to the Hollywood industry, or an alternative medium for avant-garde experimentation. Highlighting points of overlap and divergence in the histories of television and cinema, Galili demonstrates that the intermedial relationship between the two media did not start with their economic and institutional rivalry of the late 1940s but rather goes back to their very origins. In so doing, he brings film studies and television studies together in ways that advance contemporary debates in media theory.
