Article ID: CBB239805148

The Romantic-Era Lecture: Dividing and Reuniting the Arts and Sciences (2016)

unapi

This essay argues that the conceptual structure of early nineteenth-century chemistry influenced the period’s literary lectures. These distinct pursuits, chemistry and literary criticism, publicly responded in opposed ways to the growing social expectation that schools of knowledge become coherent and specialized. Chemistry’s focus on elements lent it an elegance that contributed to its increasing disciplinary stability. At the same time, this ingenious system facilitated the discipline’s accumulation of economic success and public regard in the lecture halls of London’s major Arts and Sciences Institutions. Series by chemists like Humphry Davy and William Brande popularized chemistry by emphasizing its elemental system’s structural coherence. Meanwhile, literary lecturers resisted institutional pressures to follow chemistry’s example—they refused to systematize their field by fixing its own “elements.” Instead, they embraced an inchoate interdisciplinary impulse. This context sheds new light on the well-known disorganization of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s literary lectures. In their discontinuous form, Coleridge’s lectures evaded what he saw as the disciplinary closure characteristic of chemistry. He embraced what I call “elementality,” the intrinsic analytic and combinatory power, divested of its empirical concreteness and structural rigidity, that lies at the heart of the concept of the element. Coleridge’s lectures exploited the lecture form’s volatility in order to preserve a more holistic conception of knowledge, deconstructing disciplinary boundaries and sowing the seeds of modern literary-critical interdisciplinarity. [End Page 501]

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB239805148/

Similar Citations

Article Knight, D. M.; (2000)
Humphry Davy: Science and social mobility (/isis/citation/CBB000111698/)

Thesis Fisher, Amy Alice; (2010)
An Arc Across Fields of Study: Electricity in Physics and Chemistry (1751--1807) (/isis/citation/CBB001562739/)

Book Russell, Colin Archibald; (2010)
From Atoms to Molecules: Studies in the History of Chemistry from the 19th Century (/isis/citation/CBB001220264/)

Book Stock, John Edmonds; (2003)
Memoirs of Thomas Beddoes, M. D (/isis/citation/CBB000330959/)

Article Frank A. J. L. James; (2019)
Constructing Humphry Davy’s Biographical Image (/isis/citation/CBB430195677/)

Article Kragh, Helge; (2013)
Superheavy Elements and the Upper Limit of the Periodic Table: Early Speculations (/isis/citation/CBB001212074/)

Article Isabel Malaquias; João A. B. P. Oliveira; (2019)
Shaping the Periodic Classification in Portugal through (text)books and charts (/isis/citation/CBB919212623/)

Article E. G. Marks; J. A. Marks; (2021)
Mendeleyev revisited (/isis/citation/CBB297363045/)

Article Gordin, Michael D.; (2002)
The Organic Roots of Mendeleev's Periodic Law (/isis/citation/CBB000202613/)

Article Scerri, Eric R.; Worrall, John; (2001)
Prediction and the periodic table (/isis/citation/CBB000100812/)

Article Frank A. J. L. James; Sharon Ruston; (2019)
New Studies on Humphry Davy: Introduction (/isis/citation/CBB704125685/)

Article Andrew Lacey; (2019)
New Light on John Davy (/isis/citation/CBB433584959/)

Article Gregory Tate; (2019)
Humphry Davy and the Problem of Analogy (/isis/citation/CBB652985322/)

Article Knight, David; (August 2007)
Davy and the Placing of Potassium among the Elements (/isis/citation/CBB001221270/)

Article Rubin, Mordecai B.; (2010)
The Development of the Mercury Lamp (/isis/citation/CBB001232513/)

Authors & Contributors
James, Frank A.J.L.
Marks, E. G.
Zambon, Alfio
Oliveira, João A. B. P.
Marks, J. A.
Lacey, Andrew
Concepts
Chemistry
Periodic system of the elements; periodic table
Chemical elements
Biographies
Education, Chemical
Classification
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
Enlightenment
21st century
20th century, early
Places
England
Russia
Portugal
British Isles
Great Britain
Institutions
Dublin Philosophical Society
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment