Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow (2 Vols.)

Literature’s Refraction of Science
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-90-420-3325-2
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 47, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 2023 g

Reihe: DQR Studies in Literature

Keats’ misgivings about science unweaving the rainbow and robbing Nature of its mystery were shared by many of contemporaries, and successive generations have been compelled to ask how this rapidly escalating knowledge of the universe would affect their understanding of themselves and the world they lived in. This is the concern of most of the essays in these two volumes: how are we to live with science and the issues scientific discoveries and propositions raise? And how has this relationship with science been explored and expressed in literary works? Yet even before science became such a challenge to the imagination, an awareness of how people interact with the natural world – in terms of sickness and health, medicine, mathematics – had already been a literary subject, also reflected in a number of articles in Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science. In the twentieth century doubt became a crucial component of science as well as literature, and the relativism and uncertainty of quantum physics have proved fruitful to a wide range of dramatist, poets and novelists as many articles indicate. A systematic desire for objective criteria, verifiability, and conceptual frameworks has also increased the importance of methodology and of criticism: the many approaches adopted by the contributors to these volumes further point to the refraction of science in literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Tinkler-Villani, Valeria

Barfoot, C.C.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Volume One

C.C. Barfoot & V. Tinkler-Villani: Introduction

I: THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE IN LITERATURE
T.H.J. Pettigrew: ‘Millions Infinite’
H. Doss: Milton’s Satan
S. Voyce: ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’
C.C. Barfoot: ‘The Eunuch’s Child’
J.R.M. Ames: Re-ordering Creation
R. Knell: Re-evaluating Science and Romanticism
R. Schellenberg: Revising the Obvious
J.D. Ballam: ‘Science as the Base of Wonders’
M. Herwig: Ironic Science
L. Boldrini: Rattling the Cage of Meaning

II: BODILY SCIENCE AND LITERATURE
D. Gurevitch: The Weasel, the Rose and Life after Death
W.H. Spates: Mythopoeia and Medicine
M.W. Dull: ‘Little Irritations’ in Mansfield Park
E. Anastasaki: When Science Meets Fiction
G. Ofek: Thomas Hardy’s Morphology
A. Mordavsky Caleb: Amoral Animality
E. Miller: A Defect in Nature
L. Fitzsimmons: Tertium Quid: Gertrude Stein and Psychical Research
R. Arias: Life After Man?
M.A. Ferreira: ‘Toward a Science of Perfect Reproduction’?
M. Chehab: Autobiography, Autobiology, Tautology
P. Venkatesan: The Narratives of Science
E.J. van Leeuwen: Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
K. Williams Renk: Debating Darwin
C. Lara Rallo: ‘She Thought Human Thoughts and Stone Thoughts’
G. Olson: Transfers Between Science and Literature
E.L. Arnold: Healing with Holograms

Volume Two

III: PHYSICS OLD AND NEW IN LITERATURE
E.-S. Zehelein: Staging Science with Albert Einstein
C. Kent: ‘How Does the Mind Move to Einstein’s Physics?’
A. Enns: A Sum Over Histories
J. Emerson: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
G. Jones & K. Ells: Chaos and Complexity in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy
B. Kimmelman: ‘Equal, That Is, to the Real Itself’
P. Mudford: Contemporary Drama and the Uncertainty Principle
M.H. Whitworth: ‘Within the Ray of Light’, and Without

IV: THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE IN LITERATURE
R. Druce: ‘The Iron Horses of the Steam’
E. Schenkel: H.G. Wells and Speed
R.S. Friedman: Surveying the Empirical Sublime
P.J. Kowalski: ‘Fearfully and Wonderfully Made’
M. Corporaal: ‘So Cold, so Lofty and so Distant’
J. Hoeg: Literary Portrayals of Science as a Function of Socio-Environmental Relations in the Spanish-Speaking World
J. Cusatis: ‘The Curious Desire of Knowing’
P. McCloskey Engle: Reprising the Epistemological Function of Narrative
D.C. Maus: Luddites of the Nuclear Age
D.J. Thiess: Lighting Cigars at the Heart of a Nightingale
S. Dauncey: Forensic Anthropology and the Reconstruction of History in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost
N. Harel: Constructing the Nonhuman as Human

Notes on Contributors
Index I
Index II