Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution PDF Author: Michael Slater
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040013945
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution PDF Author: Michael Slater
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040013945
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution PDF Author: MICHAEL. SLATER
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032422718
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book uncovers the relation between figuration and science in the early modern world. It shows that changes we tend to understand in scientific terms had implications for, and were implicated by, changes in literary structure, revealing that the "scientific revolution" was literary and that the "literary revolution" was scientific.

Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution

Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution PDF Author: Wilbur Applebaum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135582556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1628

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Book Description
With unprecedented current coverage of the profound changes in the nature and practice of science in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, this comprehensive reference work addresses the individuals, ideas, and institutions that defined culture in the age when the modern perception of nature, of the universe, and of our place in it is said to have emerged. Covering the historiography of the period, discussions of the Scientific Revolution's impact on its contemporaneous disciplines, and in-depth analyses of the importance of historical context to major developments in the sciences, The Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution is an indispensible resource for students and researchers in the history and philosophy of science.

Chaos and Cosmos

Chaos and Cosmos PDF Author: Heidi C. M. Scott
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271065389
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

The Iron Dream

The Iron Dream PDF Author: Norman Spinrad
Publisher: Gateway
ISBN: 0575117222
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Norman Spinrad's 1972 alternate history, gives us both a metafictional what-if novel and a cutting satire of one of the 20th century's most evil regimes . . . In 1919, a young Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler immigrated to the United States to become an illustrator for the pulp magazines and, eventually, a Hugo Award-winning SF author. This volume contains his greatest work, Lord of the Swastika: an epic post-apocalyptic tale of genetic 'trueman' Feric Jagger and his quest to purify the bloodline of humanity by ruthlessly slaughtering races of the genetically impure - a quest Norman Spinrad expertly skewers through ironic imagery and over-the-top rhetoric. Spinrad hoped to expose some unpalatable truths about much of SF and Fantasy literature and its uncomfortable relationship with fascist ideologies - an aim that was not always apparent to neo-fascist readers. In order to make his aims clear to the hard-of-understanding, Spinrad added an imaginary critical analysis by a fictional literary scholar, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

Tropics of Haiti

Tropics of Haiti PDF Author: Marlene L. Daut
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1781388806
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
A literary history of the Haitian Revolution that explores how scientific ideas about ‘race’ affected 19th-century understandings of the Haitian Revolution and, conversely, how understandings of the Haitian Revolution affected 19th-century scientific ideas about race.

Rational Rhetoric

Rational Rhetoric PDF Author: David J. Tietge
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
ISBN: 1602353204
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
David J. Tietge examines the place and influence of scientific discourse in the popular consciousness of contemporary American society, offering critical strategies for recognizing, decoding, and understanding scientific language as it is used by both scientific and a-scientific agents and agencies.

The Calamity Form

The Calamity Form PDF Author: Anahid Nersessian
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670131X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization. Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.

Romantic Sobriety

Romantic Sobriety PDF Author: Orrin N. C. Wang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Winner, 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, International Conference on Romanticism This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Brontë, and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

Legacy

Legacy PDF Author: James H. Schmitz
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 152878166X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This is a classic science fiction novel by James H. Schmitz that first appeared in Analog Science Fact and Fiction. It tells the story of the beautiful and deadly martial artist Trigger Agree and her quest to find her associate Holati Tate. Tate disappeared after discovering the Plasmoids, ancient living machines that were banished to a far off part of the galaxy but no-one knows why. Will she succeed and unravel the mystery? Find out in this thrilling tale of adventure. This work is part of our Vintage Sci-Fi Classics Series, a series in which we are republishing some of the best stories in the genre by some of its most acclaimed authors, such as Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Robert Sheckley. Each publication is complete with a short introduction to the history of science fiction.