The collection is organized into three parts, each addressing a different object of scientific inquiry: plants, bodies, and energies. The essays in Strange Science thus dynamically investigate concepts that were and are inherently unstable, and the essays within each section provide a thickly textured analysis of the object of inquiry. As the range of essays within each section shows, the ways in which these scientific topics were addressed by Victorian scientists, artists, and fiction writers alike confound the marginal/mainstream divide in provocative and generative ways. In some cases, although the goal of inquiry was a more scientifically accurate understanding of the natural world, the motivating concerns were primarily spiritual or aesthetic. In others, a scientific idea, whether controversial or established, often served as the catalyst for speculations about the far-reaching implications of scientific discoveries, whether ethical or philosophical. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that, far from existing in a closed system of the pure empiricism, Victorian scientific practice was as affected by imaginative and fantastic possibilities as the fictional works it inspired. (From Introduction, page 7-8)
...MoreBook Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.
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