Product Description: Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination...read more

Product Description: In Victorian Britain an array of writers captured the excitement of new scientific discoveries, and enticed young readers and listeners into learning their secrets, by converting introductory explanations into quirky, charming, and imaginative fairy-tales; forces could be fairies, dinosaurs could be dragons, and looking closely at a drop of water revealed a soup of monsters...read more

Product Description: New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact…and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide readers on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives...read more

Product Description: This book makes an important intervention in the ongoing debates about modernism, science, and the divisions of early Twentieth-Century print culture. In order to establish Joyce's place in the nexus of modernism and scientific thought, Drouin uses the methods of periodical studies and textual criticism to examine the impact of Einstein's relativity theories on the development of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)...read more

Product Description: William Shakespeare lived at a remarkable time―a period we now recognize as the first phase of the Scientific Revolution. New ideas were transforming Western thought, the medieval was giving way to the modern, and the work of a few key figures hinted at the brave new world to come: the methodical and rational Galileo, the skeptical Montaigne, and―as Falk convincingly argues―Shakespeare, who observed human nature just as intently as the astronomers who studied the night sky...read more

Product Description: Could the dodo make a comeback? What does science tell us about the sex in Fifty Shades of Grey? Is giving up meat really the greenest option? Can you use tweets to spot a psychopath? Do birds make art? What do the Cold War and climate science have in common? And can a psychologist interpret your farts? The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 brings together great writing about life and the universe, including contributions from poets and psychologists, comedians and climate commentators, neuroscientists and novelists, star-gazers and science journalists...read more

Product Description: Britain in the long nineteenth century developed an increasing interest in science of all kinds. The essays in this collection uncover this symbiotic relationship between literature and science.

Product Description: Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel ― a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives ― has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion...read more

Product Description: Over the last thirty years, more and more critics and scholars have come to recognize the importance of science to literature. 'Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions' is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on what poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made of the scientific developments going on around them...read more

Science on Stage is the first full-length study of the phenomenon of "science plays"--theatrical events that weave scientific content into the plot lines of the drama. The book investigates the tradition of science on the stage from the Renaissance to the present, focusing in particular on the current wave of science playwriting. Drawing on extensive interviews with playwrights and directors, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr discusses such works as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. She asks questions such as, What accounts for the surge of interest in putting science on the stage? What areas of science seem most popular with playwrights, and why? How has the tradition evolved throughout the centuries? What currents are defining it now? And what are some of the debates and controversies surrounding the use of science on stage? Organized by scientific themes, the book examines selected contemporary plays that represent a merging of theatrical form and scientific content--plays in which the science is literally enacted through the structure and performance of the play. Beginning with a discussion of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the book traces the history of how scientific ideas (quantum mechanics and fractals, for example) are dealt with in theatrical presentations. It discusses the relationship of science to society, the role of science in our lives, the complicated ethical considerations of science, and the accuracy of the portrayal of science in the dramatic context. The final chapter looks at some of the most recent and exciting developments in science playwriting that are taking the genre in innovative directions and challenging the audience's expectations of a science play. The book includes a comprehensive annotated list of four centuries of science plays, which will be useful for teachers, students, and general readers alike.

Product Description: In 1972, in an attempt to elevate the stature of the "crime novel," influential crime writer and critic Julian Symons cast numerous Golden Age detective fiction writers into literary perdition as "Humdrums," condemning their focus on puzzle plots over stylish writing and explorations of character, setting and theme...read more

Product Description: At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science,' beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods...read more

Product Description: This book examines the ways in which contemporary British and British postcolonial writers in the after-empire era draw connections between magic (defined here as Renaissance Hermetic philosophy) and science. Writers such as Tom Stoppard, Zadie Smith, and Margaret Atwood critique both imperial science, or science used in service to empire, and what Renk calls "imperical science," a distortion of rational science which denies that reality is holistic and claims that nature can and should be conquered...read more

Product Description: This book examines types of resistance in contemporary poetry to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them...read more

Product Description: The reassessment of the 'two cultures' of art and science has been one of the most urgent areas of research in literary and historical studies over the last fifteen years. The early modern period is an ideal site for such an investigation precisely because of the pre-disciplinary nature of its science...read more

Product Description: Il volume sarà diviso in due parti. La prima parte è un dizionario dei termini e dei concetti scientifici presenti nell’opera di Gianni Rodari. Un esempio di diffusione di cultura scientifica critica. La seconda parte è la ricostruzione della vita di Gianni Rodari nel tentativo di dimostrare la centralità nel suo lavoro del rapporto Letteratura/scienza...read more

Product Description: In 1752 Voltaire published Micromégas, the story of a 120,000-foot tall resident of a planet of Sirius who visited our solar system. As a parting gift, the visitor gave the French Academy of Sciences a book that, he said, contained the answer to all things...read more

Product Description: Die Autorin untersucht in ihrer Arbeit die Austauschprozesse zwischen Literatur und Naturwissenschaften am Beispiel von Adalbert Stifters Werk. Sie zeigt, wie die Umstellung der Naturwahrnehmung von der älteren Naturkunde auf die modernen Naturwissenschaften zu einem Problem für die Literatur wird...read more

Product Description: Examines the body in literature and science in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.

Product Description: In this major new book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have written in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--three highly articulate and alarmed witnesses to the great crisis in modern intellectual history, the professionalization of science...read more

Product Description: Science Plays form a flourishing dramatic sub-genre. The present study provides an informative overview shedding light on the diversity of ways in which the natural sciences and/or scientists are put on stage. Detailed text-based analyses of eighteen plays, many of them previously unexamined elsewhere, exemplify the genre's remarkable variety...read more