Over the last thirty years, more and more critics and scholars have come to recognize the significant influence of science on literature. This collection of essays focuses specifically on what poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made of modern scientific developments. In these twelve essays, leading experts on modern poetry, literature, and science explore how poets have used scientific language in their poems, how poetry can offer new perspectives on science, and how the two cultures can and have come together in the work of poets from Britain, Ireland, America, and Australia.
These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.
Between Science and Literature introduces the fundamentals of cultural and literary theory to nonspecialists while reorienting these fields toward exciting new ideas, especially the notion of language itself as a kind of living thing. In the process, Ira Livingston draws on the work of thinkers across disciplines, from philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari to sociologists like Niklas Luhmann and biologists like Stuart Kauffmann, as well as historians, gender theorists, and science fiction writers. -- from back cover.
This issue explores the tensions between literature and the sciences, focusing on responses which see science as an alien ideology that threatens everything the arts hold dear, and on a more positive response that sees the sciences as providing new tools, viewpoints, and knowledge about the world.
A collaboration between leading poets and scientists, this title shows through its form, and through practice, as well as reflection, that poetry and science can meet with productive results. It also shows how modes of scientific knowledge and of poetic making continue to be intertwined.
This book examines types of resistance in contemporary poetry to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them. Walpert argues that contemporary poetry offers a palimpsest of resistance, using as case studies the poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth, and Joan Retallack to trace the recapitulation of romantic arguments (inherited from Keats, Shelly, and Coleridge, which in turn were produced in part in response to Newtonian physics), modernist arguments (inherited from Eliot and Pound, arguments influenced in part by relativity and quantum theory), and postmodernist arguments (arguments informed by post-structuralist theory, e.g. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, with affinities to arguments for the limitations of science in the philosophy, sociology, and rhetoric of science). Some of these poems reveal the discursive ideologies of scientific language—reveal, in other words, the performativity of scientific language. In doing so, these poems themselves can also be read as performative acts and, therefore, as forms of intervention rather than representation. Reading Retallack alongside science studies scholar Karen Barad, the book concludes by proposing that viewing knowledge as a form of intervention, rather than representation, offers a bridge between contemporary poetry and science.
The Poetical gazette; the official organ of the Poetry society and a review of poetical affairs, nos. 4-7 issued as supplements to the Academy, v. 79, Oct. 15, Nov. 5, Dec. 3 and 31, 1910
This study presents the revolutionary thesis that English poetry and poetic theory were deflected from their richest line of development by the scientific rationalism that came with Hobbes and has continued its restrictive influence to the present day, when such poets as Yeats and Eliot have begun the reestablishment of the earlier line of development. Originally published in 1939. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
