Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science
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. Entwining innovative readings of the works of George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Morris, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, William Whewell, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes, F. Max Müller and Edward B. Tylor, 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.
Key Features
Exemplifies and expounds an approach to Victorian writing, drawn from practice theory (Pickering, Latour, de Certeau, Schatzki) and social anthropology (Ingold), that is centred on practices rather than discoursesStudies activities of knowledge-making in literature and science in order to show why it is appropriate to speak of Victorian poetry and fiction as a mode of experimentationExplicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory

1128634558
Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science
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. Entwining innovative readings of the works of George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Morris, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, William Whewell, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes, F. Max Müller and Edward B. Tylor, 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.
Key Features
Exemplifies and expounds an approach to Victorian writing, drawn from practice theory (Pickering, Latour, de Certeau, Schatzki) and social anthropology (Ingold), that is centred on practices rather than discoursesStudies activities of knowledge-making in literature and science in order to show why it is appropriate to speak of Victorian poetry and fiction as a mode of experimentationExplicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory

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Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

by Philipp Erchinger
Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

by Philipp Erchinger

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$37.95 
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Overview

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. Entwining innovative readings of the works of George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and William Morris, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, William Whewell, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes, F. Max Müller and Edward B. Tylor, 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.
Key Features
Exemplifies and expounds an approach to Victorian writing, drawn from practice theory (Pickering, Latour, de Certeau, Schatzki) and social anthropology (Ingold), that is centred on practices rather than discoursesStudies activities of knowledge-making in literature and science in order to show why it is appropriate to speak of Victorian poetry and fiction as a mode of experimentationExplicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474438964
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 08/25/2020
Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing1. The Art of Science: Nineteenth-Century Theory and the Logic of Practice2. Learning by Experiment: T. H. Huxley and the Aesthetic Nature of Education3. Following the Actors: G. H. Lewes’s and George Eliot’s Studies in Life4. Steps Towards an Ecology of Experience: Empiricism, Pragmatism and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy5. Speech in Action: Victorian Philology and the Uprooting of Language6. William Morris’s ‘Work-Pleasure’: Literature, Science and Fine Art7. Robert Browning’s Experiment: Composition and Communication in The Ring and the Book8. The Making of Sensation FictionClothing Matter: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor ResartusBibliographyIndex

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