Review
"Essential reading for anyone interested in the relation of literature and science."--Nineteenth-Century Literature
"From her sensitive discussions of Darwin's writing style,...to her more polemical interventions...Beer is careful to maintain a productive tension in her various deductions and claims. All in all, a fine and instructive collection."--Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
Product Description
Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of change, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of the essays centers on Darwin; other essays look at Hardy, Helmholtz, Hopkins, Clerk Maxwell, and Woolf. The collection throws a different light on Victorian experience and the rise of modernism and engages with current controversies about the place of science in culture.
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