Science & Omniscience in Nineteenth Century Literature

ISBN-13: 9781845196479 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 224 str.

Jonathan Taylor

Opis

This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace's much-cited dream in 1812 of "a vast intelligence" in which the future and the past are equally calculable. From there, author Jonathan Taylor investigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe, and Wordsworth. This work then explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward to more modern conceptions of science in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Chaos Theory and Einsteinian Cosmology. This book also covers a vast array of topics, including philosophy; Wagner's music and music in general; Jungian analysis; and ends with the "omniscient" narrator in Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, as an example of what came to be the dominant mode of narration in later Victorian fiction.