Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism

Traces the practice of induction - manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - and its uses by Romantic-period writers.

List of contents

Introduction: Romanticism's composite orders; 1. Knowledge, text, mind: a history of inductive method; Part I. Making Texts: The Annotated Poem: 2. Erasmus Darwin's prose of the world: induction and the philosophical poem; 3. Poetics of the commonplace: Robert Southey's analogical romance; The First Landing Place: Prose Notes and Embedded Verse; Part II. Making Minds: Poetry in Prose: 4. Methodizing the mind: experimental education and the poetic excerpt; 5. Coleridge and literary criticism: the pains of induction; Final Landing Place: The Composite Incarnate.

About the author

Dahlia Porter is Lecturer in English Literature and Material Culture at the University of Glasgow. Her articles on literature, science, medicine, and visual art appear in Representations, Romanticism, and The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation and in essay collections on Samuel Johnson, Charlotte Smith, and The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She co-edited Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800 (2008) with Michael Gamer, and is a member of the Multigraph Collective, a group of 22 scholars who co-wrote Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2018).

Summary

Exploring a topic at the intersection of science, philosophy and literature, this book traces the history of induction - manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - as a writerly practice, and accounts for mixtures of poetry and prose in the work of major Romantic-period writers.

Product details

• Authors: Dahlia Porter, Dahlia (University of Glasgow) Porter, Dahlia (University of North Texas) Porter, Porter Dahlia
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2018
• EAN: 9781108418942
• ISBN: 978-1-108-41894-2
• No. of pages: 314
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism; Cambridge Studies in Romantici; Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; English, History of Science, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literature: history & criticism, Romanticism, Impact of science & technology on society, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers