Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable

The Victorians are known for their commitment to materialism, evidenced by the dominance of empiricism in the sciences and realism in fiction. Yet there were other strains of thinking during the period in the physical sciences, social sciences, and literature that privileged the spacesbetweenthe material and immaterial. This book examines how the emerging language of the "imponderable" helped Victorian writers and physicists make sense of new experiences of modernity. As Sarah Alexander arg...