Book ID: CBB350652099

Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (2017)

unapi

Goldstein, Amanda Jo (Author)


University of Chicago Press


Publication Date: 2017
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.

...More
Reviewed By

Review Maurizio Esposito (2020) Review of "Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 377-378). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB350652099/

Similar Citations

Book Amanda Jo Goldstein; (2017)
Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (/isis/citation/CBB817048513/)

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 Gigante, Denise; (2009)
Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (/isis/citation/CBB000954780/)

Book Jackson, Noel; (2008)
Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (/isis/citation/CBB000850370/)

Book Holland, Jocelyn; (2009)
German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter (/isis/citation/CBB001221163/)

Chapter Maierhofer, Waltraud; (2012)
Goethe and Forestry (/isis/citation/CBB001421369/)

Thesis Joseph Fletcher; (2016)
Quid's Pantheism: William Blake as Natural Philosopher (/isis/citation/CBB265152879/)

Thesis Rispoli, Stephanie Adair; (2014)
Anatomy, Vitality, and the Romantic Body: Blake, Coleridge, and the Hunter Circle, 1750--1840 (/isis/citation/CBB001567614/)

Book Mahood, M. M.; (2008)
The Poet as Botanist (/isis/citation/CBB000952173/)

Thesis Colman, John; (2006)
Science, Politics, and Poetry: A Study of Lucretius' “On the Nature of Things” (/isis/citation/CBB001561678/)

Book Kuhn, Bernhard Helmut; (2009)
Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (/isis/citation/CBB000952156/)

Article Sommer, Marianne; (2003)
The Romantic Cave? The Scientific and Poetic Quests for Subterranean Spaces in Britain (/isis/citation/CBB000470492/)

Thesis Higgins, John Robert; (2011)
Fossil Poetry, the Birth of Geology, and the Romantic Imagination, 1790--1860 (/isis/citation/CBB001567320/)

Book Priestman, Martin; (2013)
The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (/isis/citation/CBB001552321/)

Book Dahlia Porter; (2018)
Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism (/isis/citation/CBB734911585/)

Authors & Contributors
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
Travis Benjamin Wilds
Fletcher, Joseph
Michael Lucey
Bridget E. Kapler
Lansley, Charles Morris
Concepts
Romanticism
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Science and culture
Aesthetics
Materialism
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Enlightenment
Ancient
Places
Great Britain
Germany
London (England)
Rome (Italy)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

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

Log in or register to comment