Nineteenth-Century Energies
Nineteenth-Century Energies

Author: Lynn Voskuil

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-05

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1317359534

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Nineteenth-Century Energies explores the idea of ‘energy’, a concept central to new directions in interdisciplinary studies today. It examines the cultural perceptions and uses of energy in the nineteenth century – both in terms of pure and applied science, and as an idea with widespread diffusion in the popular imagination – in contributions by scholars drawing on a variety of fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, French studies, Latin American studies, cinema studies, and art history. These contributions explore the rise of insomnia as a recognized ailment, the role of guns and gun culture in the perception of human agency, the first uses of the barometer to predict massive cyclonic weather systems, and the hallucinatory, almost occult effects of radiant energy in early film. Exemplifying innovative research in twenty-first century academia, this volume also speaks to the wider cultural concerns of today’s global citizen about the preservation and renewal of natural resources around the world; the emergence of devices and technologies that have both improved and impaired human life; the aggrandizement of nation-states around large technological systems; and the centrality of the image in our perception and absorption of contemporary culture. This book was originally published as a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Author: Barri J. Gold

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-10

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 3030686043

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Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books—Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds—and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature
Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature

Author: Mary Grace Albanese

Publisher:

Published: 2023-11-08

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 100931422X

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Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature intervenes in traditional narratives of 19th-century American modernity by situating Black women at the center of an increasingly connected world. While traditional accounts of modernity have emphasized advancements in communication technologies, animal and fossil fuel extraction, and the rise of urban centers, Mary Grace Albanese proposes that women of African descent combated these often violent regimes through diasporic spiritual beliefs and practices, including spiritual possession, rootwork, midwifery, mesmerism, prophecy, and wandering. It shows how these energetic acts of resistance were carried out on scales large and small: from the constrained corners of the garden plot to the expansive circuits of global migration. By examining the concept of energy from narratives of technological progress, capital accrual and global expansion, this book uncovers new stories that center Black women at the heart of a pulsating, revolutionary world.

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism
Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism

Author: Stefan Herbrechter

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 1233

ISBN-13: 3031049586

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Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Final Frontiers
Final Frontiers

Author: Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee

Publisher: Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies

Published: 2020-01-31

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1789620287

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This is the first book-length study of the relationship between science fiction, the techno-scientific policies of independent India, and the global non-aligned movement that emerged as a response to the Cold War and decolonization. Today, we see the trend of science fiction writers being used by governments as advisors on techno-scientific policies and defence industries. But such relationships between literature, policy and geo-politics have a long and complex history. Glimpses of this history can be seen in the case of the first generation of post-colonial Indian science fiction writers, the policies of scientific and technological development in independent India, and the political strategy of non-alignment advocated by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who proposed that Third World nations should maintain an equal distance between Washington and Moscow. Such a perspective reveals the surprisingly long and relatively unknown life of Indian science fiction, as well as the critical role played by the genre in imagining alternative pathways for scientific and geo-political developments to those that dominate our lives now.

Energy in American History
Energy in American History

Author: Jeffrey B. Webb

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 1015

ISBN-13:

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"Contextualizes and analyzes the key energy transitions in U.S. history and the central importance of energy production and consumption on the American environment and in American culture and politics"--

Nineteenth-Century Worlds
Nineteenth-Century Worlds

Author: Keith Hanley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 131796893X

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This volume assembles a wide range of studies that together provide—through their interdisciplinary range, international scope, and historical emphases—an original scholarly exploration of one of the most important topics in recent nineteenth-century studies: the emergence in the nineteenth century of forms of global experience that have developed more recently into rapidly expanding processes of globalization and their attendant collisions of race, religion, ethnicity, population groups, natural environments, national will and power. Emphasizing such links between global networks past and present, the essays in this volume engage with the latest work in postcolonial, cosmopolitan, and globalization theory while speaking directly to the most pressing concerns of contemporary geopolitics. Each essay examines specific cultural and historical circumstances in the formation of nineteenth-century worlds from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including economics, political history, natural history, philosophy, the history of medicine and disease, religious studies, literary criticism, art history, and colonial studies. Detailed in their particular modes of analysis yet integrated into a collective conversation about the nineteenth century’s profound impact on our present worlds, these inquiries also explore the economic, political, and cultural determinants on nineteenth-century types of transnational experience as interweaving forces creating new material frameworks and conceptual models for comprehending major human categories—such as race, gender, subjectivity, and national identity—in global terms. As nineteenth-century global intersections differ in important ways from the shapes of globalization today, however, the essays in this volume generate new ways of understanding emergent patterns of worldwide experience in the age of imperialism and thereby stimulate fresh insights into the dynamics of global formations and conflicts today.

Cultures of Energy
Cultures of Energy

Author: Sarah Strauss

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1315430835

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This path-breaking volume explores cultures of energy, the underlying but under-appreciated dimensions of both crisis and innovation in resource use around the globe. Theoretical chapters situate pressing energy issues in larger conceptual frames, and ethnographic case studies reveal energy as it is imagined, used, and contested in a variety of cultural contexts. Contributors address issues including the connection between resource flows and social relationships in energy systems; cultural transformation and notions of progress and collapse; the blurring of technology and magic; social tensions that accompany energy contraction; and sociocultural changes required in affluent societies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Each of five thematic sections concludes with an integrative and provocative conversation among the authors. The volume is an ideal tool for teaching unique, contemporary, and comparative perspectives on social theories of science and technology in undergraduate and graduate courses.