Enlightenment Science in the Romantic Era


Book Description

Joseph Berzelius (1779-1848), one of the world's leading scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century, dominated the field of chemistry, animated the cultural life of his native Sweden, and served for three decades as secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Despite his immense stature, modern studies have underestimated his significance. This volume remedies the scarcity of accessible, modern assessments of Berzelius by bringing to a broad audience the results of recent scholarship, and it offers an enhanced assessment of his originality and influence.




The Romantic Machine


Book Description

Introduction: Mechanical Romanticism -- DEVICES OF COSMIC UNITY -- Ampère's Experiments: Contours of a Cosmic Cubstance -- Humboldt's Instruments: Even the Tools Will Be Free -- Arago's Daguerreotype: The Labor Theory of Knowledge -- SPECTACLES OF CREATION AND METAMORPHOSIS -- The Devil's Opera: Fantastic Physiospiritualism -- Monsters, Machine-Men, Magicians: The Automaton in the Garden -- ENGINEERS OF ARTIFICIAL PARADISES -- Saint-Simonian Engines: Love and Conversions -- Leroux's Pianotype: The Organogenesis of Humanity -- Comte's Calendar: From Infinite Universe to Closed World -- Conclusion: Afterlives of the Romantic Machine.




A Companion to Romanticism


Book Description

The Companion to Romanticism is a major introductory survey from an international galaxy of scholars writing new pieces, specifically for a student readership, under the editorship of Duncan Wu.




Romanticism and the Sciences


Book Description

This book presents a series of essays which focus on the role of Romantic philosophy and ideology in the sciences.




Science in the Romantic Era


Book Description

First published in 1998. The Romantic Era was a time when society, religion and other beliefs, and science were all in flux. The idea that the universe was a great clock, and that men were little clocks, all built by a divine watchmaker, was giving way to a more dynamic and pantheistic way of thinking. A new language was invented for chemistry, replacing metaphor with algebra; and scientific illustration came to play the role of a visual language, deeply involved with theory. A scientific community came gradually into being as the 19th century wore on. The papers which compose this book have appeared in a wide range of books and journals; together with the new introduction they illuminate science and its context in the Romantic Era and follow its effects in the 19th century.




The Age of Wonder


Book Description

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes's Falling Upwards.




Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era


Book Description

Examines the massive impact of colonial exploration on British scientific and literary activity between the 1760s and 1830s.




Romanticism in Science


Book Description

Romanticism in all its expression communicated a vision of the essential interconnectedness and harmony of the universe. The romantic concept of knowledge was decidedly unitary, but, in the period between 1790 and 1840, the special emphasis it placed on observation and research led to an unprecedented accumulation of data, accompanied by a rapid growth in scientific specialization. An example of the tensions created by this development is to be found in the scientists' congresses which attempted a first response to the fragmentation of scientific research. The problem concerning the unitary concept of knowledge in that period, and the new views of the world which were generated are the subject of this book. The articles it contains are all based on original research by an international group of highly specialized scholars. Their research probes a wide range of issues, from the heirs of Naturphilosophie, to the `life sciences', and to the debate on `Baconian Sciences', as well as examining many aspects of mathematics, physics and chemistry. History of philosophy and history of science scholars will find this book an essential reference work, as well as all those interested in 19th century history in general. Undergraduate and graduate students will also find here angles and topics that have hitherto been largely neglected.




Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850


Book Description

Review: "Written to stress the crosscurrent of ideas, this cultural encyclopedia provides clearly written and authoritative articles. Thoughts, themes, people, and nations that define the Romantic Era, as well as some frequently overlooked topics, receive their first encyclopedic treatments in 850 signed articles, with bibliographies and coverage of historical antecedents and lingering influences of romanticism. Even casual browsers will discover much to enjoy here."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004.




John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment


Book Description

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time.