Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840
Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840

Author: Mary Fairclough

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1137593156

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book investigates the science of electricity in the long eighteenth century and its textual life in literary and political writings. Electricity was celebrated as a symbol of enlightened progress, but its operation and its utility were unsettlingly obscure. As a result, debates about the nature of electricity dovetailed with discussions of the relation between body and soul, the nature of sexual attraction, the properties of revolutionary communication and the mysteries of vitality. This study explores the complex textual manifestations of electricity between 1740 and 1840, in which commentators describe it both as a material force and as a purely figurative one. The book analyses attempts by both elite and popular practitioners of electricity to elucidate the mysteries of electricity, and traces the figurative uses of electrical language in the works of writers including Mary Robinson, Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, Mary Shelley and Richard Carlile.

The Shocking History of Electric Fishes
The Shocking History of Electric Fishes

Author: Stanley Finger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-09-08

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 0195366727

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This beautifully illustrated and scholarly book examines the importance of electric fishes in science and medicine and how three species in particular shaped neurophysiology. Anchored in the philosophy and science of past epochs, it is the story of one of Nature's greatest puzzles. Over a long and tortuous path, it focuses on how some numbing fishes helped to make physiology modern.