IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001213304

Introduction: Literature, Science, and the Natural World in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012)

McKechnie, Claire (Author)
Alder, Emily (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 5, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 1-4
Publication date: 2012
Language: English

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Introduction to a special section, “Literature, Science, and the Natural World in the Long Nineteenth Century”

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

In the twenty-first century, nature occupies a crucial position in social, environmental, and economic debates about global sustainability. Many of these debates over humanity's relationship with the natural world are not new, but emerged in response to an Enlightenment worldview positing human capacity to control nature through science and technology. The circulation of ideas about the impact of new technologies, the use and misuse of resources and landscapes, and human responsibilities towards the environment and its preservation intensified over the nineteenth century, due partly to the growth of industrialism and the new discourses to which it gave rise. And what is impossible to science? asked Friedrich Engels in 1844, arguing against the existence of natural limits in light of human ingenuity (qtd. in Dresner 14). Yet humanity's ability, and its right, to control nature were also debated and questioned over the course of the nineteenth century, a period which saw rapid social, industrial, and scientific change, bringing the natural world to the forefront of the Victorian cultural imagination. John Ruskin's image of clouds as meteorological omens of the effects of modern industrialisation in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) encapsulated nature's central function as metaphor as well as the focus of scientific investigation; the natural world itself responded to changing times and a changing Britain. The natural world was intricately bound up with how Victorians thought about themselves and how they related to their social world, to the extent that we can hardly extricate the idea of nature from the idea of the nineteenth-century imagination.

...More

Description Contents:

Includes Series Articles

Article Murphy, Ruth (2012) Darwin and 1860s Children's Literature: Belief, Myth or Detritus. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 5-21). unapi

Article Welshman, Rebecca (2012) “The Riddle of this Painful Earth”: Late Victorian Literature and Archaeology during the Great Agricultural Depression. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 22-37). unapi

Article Bouttier, Sarah (2012) “Wherein Does Fitness Lie?” Darwinian Fitness and Presence in D. H. Lawrence. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 38-54). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001213304

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Fairman, Elisabeth R.; Art, Yale Center for British; (2014)
Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists' Books and the Natural World (/p/isis/citation/CBB001500458/)

Thesis Whitney, Tyler; (2013)
Spaces of the Ear: Literature, Media, and the Science of Sound, 1870--1930 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562886/)

Book Jeff Karnicky; (2016)
Scarlet Experiment: Birds and Humans in America (/p/isis/citation/CBB488937827/)

Book Major, Judith K.; (2013)
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer: A Landscape Critic in the Gilded Age (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422319/)

Thesis Kent Robert Linthicum; (2016)
Scientific and Cultural Interpretations of Volcanoes, 1766-1901 (/p/isis/citation/CBB093050540/)

Article Zur, Dafna; (2014)
Let's Go to the Moon: Science Fiction in the North Korean Children's Magazine Adong Munhak, 1956--1965 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001214666/)

Article Beyler, Richard H.; (2008)
Hostile Environmental Intellectuals? Critiques and Counter-Critiques of Science and Technology in West Germany after 1945 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930039/)

Chapter Brown, Alistair; (2011)
E-Volutionary Fictions: The Darwin Algorithm in Literature and Computer Games (/p/isis/citation/CBB001202034/)

Article Siegert, Bernhard; (2013)
Mineral Sound or Missing Fundamental: Cultural History as Signal Analysis (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320385/)

Book Stefanie Stockhorst; Jürgen Overhoff; Penelope J. Corfield; (2021)
Human-Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century: From Pests and Predators to Pets, Poems and Philosophy (/p/isis/citation/CBB446524520/)

Article Zeisler-Vralsted, Dorothy; (2014)
The Aesthetics of the Volga and National Narratives in Russia (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421406/)

Book Wilt L. Idema; (2019)
Insects in Chinese Literature: A Study and Anthology (/p/isis/citation/CBB239995784/)

Chapter Ramakers, Bart; (2011)
Staging Nature: Observation, Imagination and Experience in E.M. Post's Het land, in brieven (1788) (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201623/)

Chapter Vermij, Rienk; (2011)
The Light of Nature and the Allegorisation of Science on Dutch Frontispieces around 1700 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201619/)

Chapter Elliott, Paul; (2012)
Erasmus Darwin's Trees (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421358/)

Article Garlick, Steve; (2009)
Given Time: Biology, Nature and Photographic Vision (/p/isis/citation/CBB000953780/)

Book Wallach, Jennifer Jensen; (2013)
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture (/p/isis/citation/CBB001202133/)

Book Caporael, Linnda R.; Griesemer, James R.; Wimsatt, William C.; (2014)
Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition (/p/isis/citation/CBB001510224/)

Book Hirt, Paul W.; (2012)
The Wired Northwest: The History of Electric Power, 1870s--1970s (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201248/)

Book Gavroglu, Kostas; (2014)
History of Artificial Cold: Scientific, Technological and Cultural Issues (/p/isis/citation/CBB001500399/)