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Reads Victorian literature and science as artful practices that surpass the theories and discourses supposed to contain them
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.
Philipp Erchinger is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Düsseldorf.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing; 1. The Art of Science: Nineteenth Century Theory and the Logic of Practice; 2. Learning by Experiment: T. H. Huxley and the Aesthetic Nature of Education; 3. Following the Actors: G. H. Lewes's and George Eliot's Studies in Life; 4. Steps Towards an Ecology of Experience: Empiricism, Pragmatism, and George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy; 5. Speech in Action: Victorian Philology and the Uprooting of Language; 6. William Morris's 'Work Pleasure': Literature, Science and Fine Art; 7. Robert Browning's Experiment: Composition and Communication in The Ring and the Book; 8. The Making of Sensation Fiction; Clothing Matter: Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; Bibliography; Index.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Philipp Erchinger is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. He has published a monograph on contingency and narrative form in Nashe, Sterne and Byron (Kontingenzformen) as well as articles on nineteenth century poetry and prose, literary theory and the writing of the arts and sciences.
Zusammenfassung
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to approach the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge.
