Goldstein, Amanda Jo (Author)
University of Chicago Press
Physical Details: 336
Language: English
Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Amanda Jo Goldstein;
(2017)
Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB350652099/)
Thesis
Goldstein, Amanda Jo;
(2011)
“Sweet Science”: Romantic Materialism and the New Sciences of Life
(/isis/citation/CBB001567306/)
Thesis
Kleinneiur, Joann;
(2007)
The Chemical Revolution in British Poetry, 1772--1822
(/isis/citation/CBB001560620/)
Book
Jackson, Noel;
(2008)
Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry
(/isis/citation/CBB000850370/)
Book
Gigante, Denise;
(2009)
Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
(/isis/citation/CBB000954780/)
Chapter
Maierhofer, Waltraud;
(2012)
Goethe and Forestry
(/isis/citation/CBB001421369/)
Book
Holland, Jocelyn;
(2009)
German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter
(/isis/citation/CBB001221163/)
Thesis
Elshtain, Eric P.;
(2010)
Fact, Verses, Science: Objective Poetry and Scientific Speculation in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001562759/)
Book
Kenyon-Jones, Christine;
(2001)
Kindred brutes: Animals in Romantic--period writing
(/isis/citation/CBB000100015/)
Thesis
Joseph Fletcher;
(2016)
Quid's Pantheism: William Blake as Natural Philosopher
(/isis/citation/CBB265152879/)
Book
Purton, Valerie;
(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001421851/)
Article
Jenkins, Bill;
(2015)
Henry H. Cheek and Transformism: New Light on Charles Darwin's Edinburgh Background
(/isis/citation/CBB001552649/)
Book
(1997)
Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire
(/isis/citation/CBB000076024/)
Article
Ghiselin, Michael T.;
(2015)
Darwin: German Mystic or French Rationalist?
(/isis/citation/CBB001510256/)
Thesis
Rispoli, Stephanie Adair;
(2014)
Anatomy, Vitality, and the Romantic Body: Blake, Coleridge, and the Hunter Circle, 1750--1840
(/isis/citation/CBB001567614/)
Thesis
Travis Benjamin Wilds;
(2015)
The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude: Life, Literature and the Physical Sciences in Post-Enlightenment Paris (1780-1840)
(/isis/citation/CBB613104561/)
Article
Guédès, Michel;
(1973)
Goethe et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
(/isis/citation/CBB000001520/)
Article
Amanda Jo Goldstein;
(2017)
Epigenesis by Experience: Romantic Empiricism and Non-Kantian Biology
(/isis/citation/CBB761453373/)
Article
Jessica Riskin;
(2020)
Biology’s mistress, a brief history
(/isis/citation/CBB880456753/)
Article
Alberto Carli;
(2019)
"I Owe my Salvation to Setaccio." Perceptions and Scientific Suggestions between Literature and Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB398926222/)
Be the first to comment!