Page, Michael R. (Author)
When Erasmus Darwin declared that he would "enlist the imagination under the banner of science," imaginative writers in Britain confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human societies, and of the self. The literature of the Romantic Period is a literature of change-- itself a basic definition of "science" fiction--and is consistent with, and influential in the molding of, scientific and cultural perspectives shaped by evolutionary ideas. The poets Wordsworth and Shelley engaged questions raised by contemporary science in poetry and prose, and, in turn, their influential perspectives contributed to the cultures and practices of science. Imaginatively synthesizing both the developments and future possibilities of the new science and the new perspectives explored by the Romantic poets, Mary Shelley expressed both enthusiastic vindication and cautious trepidation for the unfolding prospects of Modernity in her now mythic novel Frankenstein and the mythically-charged apocalyptic novel The Last Man . Nineteenth-century science reached its apex in 1859 with Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species , and soon after novelists began to explore the implications of evolutionary theory and its social impact. Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Samuel Butler, Richard Jefferies, and W. H. Hudson wrote fantasies which used evolutionary metaphors to imagine future societies and to raise questions about the human condition. Such evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the nineteenth century in the scientific romances of H. G. Wells. With Wells, the intersection between literary imagination and science reached full maturity. This dissertation traces the arc of the conversation between science and literature in Britain from Erasmus Darwin to Wells. Linking recent Romantic ecological critical perspectives with foundational science fiction criticism, I build a connective arc between those two contemporary critical conversations that extends through the Victorian era to suggest how both fields of inquiry benefit from critical synthesis.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/02 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3297817.
Book
Page, Michael R.;
(2012)
The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology
(/isis/citation/CBB001320100/)
Chapter
Sleigh, Charlotte;
(2005)
“This Questionable Little Book”: Narrative Ambiguity in Nineteenth Century Literature of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000772453/)
Article
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence;
(2013)
Extinction and Progress in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850)
(/isis/citation/CBB001201777/)
Article
Hale, Piers J.;
(2013)
Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley's Water Babies
(/isis/citation/CBB001320622/)
Book
Buckland, Adelene;
(2013)
Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology
(/isis/citation/CBB001320420/)
Article
Straley, Jessica;
(2007)
Of Beasts and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, and the Theory of Recapitulation
(/isis/citation/CBB001030163/)
Article
Beatty, John;
Hale, Piers J.;
(2008)
Water Babies: An Evolutionary Parable
(/isis/citation/CBB000932169/)
Article
Russell, Nicholas;
(2007)
Science and Scientists in Victorian and Edwardian Literary Novels: Insights into the Emergence of a New Profession
(/isis/citation/CBB000720042/)
Article
Stiles, Anne;
(2009)
Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist
(/isis/citation/CBB001030597/)
Book
Holmes, Richard;
(2008)
The Age of Wonder
(/isis/citation/CBB001024401/)
Article
Price, Cheryl Blake;
(2013)
Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in fin-de-siècle Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001201799/)
Book
Melissa Bailes;
(2017)
Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830
(/isis/citation/CBB476661069/)
Chapter
Bertonèche, Caroline;
(2011)
Women of Science Fiction: Romantic Mythologies and Female Emancipation from John Keats to Dan Simmons
(/isis/citation/CBB001221555/)
Thesis
Pamboukian, Sylvia Amy;
(2003)
Industrial Light and Magic: Popular Science, Technology, and the Occult in the Late Victorian Period
(/isis/citation/CBB001562340/)
Article
Hale, Piers J.;
(2010)
Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw
(/isis/citation/CBB000933103/)
Article
Manlove, Colin;
(1993)
Charles Kingsley, H.G. Wells, and the machine in Victorian fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB000034709/)
Article
Kreisel, Deanna K.;
(2014)
The Discreet Charm of Abstraction: Hyperspace Worlds and Victorian Geometry
(/isis/citation/CBB001550339/)
Chapter
Hermans, Cor;
(2010)
Looking for Utopia---Guided by Evolution? The Case of the Fabians
(/isis/citation/CBB001021563/)
Thesis
Goldstein, Amanda Jo;
(2011)
“Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB001567306/)
Chapter
Meyer, Jürgen;
(2005)
Surgical Engineering in the Nineteenth Century: Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Flatland
(/isis/citation/CBB000772465/)
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