"Finding Is the First Act": Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Science (2020)
Brown, Woodrow D. (Author)
Miller, Cristanne (Advisor)
State University of New York at Buffalo
Miller, Cristanne
Physical Details: 178
Language: English
“Finding is the first Act”: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Science examines the presence, role, and significance of the discourse of science in the work of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Chesnutt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Silas Weir Mitchell, and Karl Pearson, among others. Beginning with the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830, this dissertation argues that the paradigm shift in the status and prominence of scientific discourse had profound and variegated impacts on literary production that have so far escaped sustained attention. The discourse of science and the drive to “scientificize” extant disciplines, professions, and areas of study wrought changes in nineteenth-century American life that were actively interrogated by writers who recognized and questioned science’s claim to objective knowledge. By celebrating other identities, ways of knowing, and forms of being that were excluded and marginalized by the dominant discourse of science, these writers stage critical interventions in the relationship between the public and practitioners of science and call into question the narrative of the nineteenth century as a period of enormous progress, with each development or invention or breakthrough yet another step toward the manifestation of the fields of science and medicine as we know them today. Instead, this dissertation takes into account the unintended consequences, the failures, the misperceptions, and the scientifically reinforced prejudices and biases that are often omitted from accounts of scientific progress in order to examine the manner in which contemporary writers seized upon them as evidence of a failure inherent in the discourse of science.
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