Science Serialized

Science Serialized PDF Author: Geoffrey Cantor
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262185
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Essays examining the ways in which the Victorian periodical press presented the scientific developments of the time to general and specialized audiences. Nineteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of periodical literature, with the publication of over 100,000 different magazines and newspapers for a growing market of eager readers. The Victorian periodical press became an important medium for the dissemination of scientific ideas. Every major scientific advance in the nineteenth century was trumpeted and analyzed in periodicals ranging from intellectual quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review to popular weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, from religious periodicals such as the Evangelical Magazine to the atheistic Oracle of Reason. Scientific articles appeared side by side with the latest fiction or political reporting, while articles on nonscientific topics and serialized novels invoked scientific theories or used analogies drawn from science.The essays collected in Science Serialized examine the variety of ways in which the nineteenth-century periodical press represented science to both general and specialized readerships. They explore the role of scientific controversy in the press and the cultural politics of publication. Subject range from the presentation of botany in women's magazines to the highly public dispute between Darwin and Samuel Butler, and from discussions of the mind-body problem to those of energy physics. Contributors include leading scholars in the fields of history of science and literature: Ann B. Shteir, Jonathan Topham, Frank A. J. L. James, Roger Smith, Graeme Gooday, Crosbie Smith, Ian Higginson, Gillian Beer, Bernard Lightman, Helen Small, Gowan Dawson, Jonathan Smith, James G. Paradis, and Harriet Ritvo

Science Serialized

Science Serialized PDF Author: Geoffrey Cantor
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262262185
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book

Book Description
Essays examining the ways in which the Victorian periodical press presented the scientific developments of the time to general and specialized audiences. Nineteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of periodical literature, with the publication of over 100,000 different magazines and newspapers for a growing market of eager readers. The Victorian periodical press became an important medium for the dissemination of scientific ideas. Every major scientific advance in the nineteenth century was trumpeted and analyzed in periodicals ranging from intellectual quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review to popular weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, from religious periodicals such as the Evangelical Magazine to the atheistic Oracle of Reason. Scientific articles appeared side by side with the latest fiction or political reporting, while articles on nonscientific topics and serialized novels invoked scientific theories or used analogies drawn from science.The essays collected in Science Serialized examine the variety of ways in which the nineteenth-century periodical press represented science to both general and specialized readerships. They explore the role of scientific controversy in the press and the cultural politics of publication. Subject range from the presentation of botany in women's magazines to the highly public dispute between Darwin and Samuel Butler, and from discussions of the mind-body problem to those of energy physics. Contributors include leading scholars in the fields of history of science and literature: Ann B. Shteir, Jonathan Topham, Frank A. J. L. James, Roger Smith, Graeme Gooday, Crosbie Smith, Ian Higginson, Gillian Beer, Bernard Lightman, Helen Small, Gowan Dawson, Jonathan Smith, James G. Paradis, and Harriet Ritvo

Science Serialized

Science Serialized PDF Author: G. N. Cantor
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262269827
Category : Literature and science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Essays examining the ways in which the Victorian periodical press presented the scientific developments of the time to general and specialized audiences.

Strange Science

Strange Science PDF Author: Lara Pauline Karpenko
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472900773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society. To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

Victorian Science and Imagery

Victorian Science and Imagery PDF Author: Nancy Rose Marshall
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987996
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science PDF Author: Stella Pratt-Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317007816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.

Selling Science in the Age of Newton

Selling Science in the Age of Newton PDF Author: Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317057341
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Selling Science in the Age of Newton explores an often ignored avenue in the popularization of science. It is an investigation of how advertisements in London newspapers (from approximately 1687 to 1727) enticed consumers to purchase products relating to science: books, lecture series, and instruments. London's readers were among the first in Europe to be exposed to regular newspapers and the advertisements contained in them. This occurred just as science began to captivate the nation's imagination due, in part, to Isaac Newton's rising popularity following the publication of his Principia (1687). This unique moment allows us to see how advertising helped shape the initial public reception of science. This book fills a substantial gap in our understanding of science and the culture in which it developed by examining the medium of advertising and its function in the discourse of both early-modern science and commerce. It answers questions such as: what happens to science once it is a commodity; how are consumers tempted to purchase science amidst a sea of other commodities; how is the reading public encouraged to give social acceptance to facts of nature; and how did marketing campaigns craft newspapers readers into a source of validation for the items of science advertised? In an age where the production of scientific knowledge increasingly relied upon sales to many rather than the endorsement of a single wealthy patron, marketing was the key to success.

Science in Print

Science in Print PDF Author: Rima D. Apple
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299286134
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as “science.” But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes place. Science in Print brings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies. This ambitious volume paints a rich picture of those tools and techniques of printing, publishing, and reading that shaped the ideas and practices that grew into modern science, from the days of the Royal Society of London in the late 1600s to the beginning of the modern U.S. environmental movement in the early 1960s.

Understanding Popular Science

Understanding Popular Science PDF Author: Broks, Peter
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 9780335215485
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Science is a defining feature of the modern world, and popular science is where most of us make sense of that fact. Understanding Popular Scienceprovides a framework to help understand the development of popular science and current debates about it. In a lively and accessible style, Peter Broks shows how popular science has been invented, redefined and fought over. From early-nineteenth century radical science to twenty-first century government initiatives, he examines popular science as an arena where the authority of science and the authority of the state are legitimized and challenged. The book includes clear accounts of the public perception of scientists, visions of the future, fears of an “anti-science†movement and concerns about scientific literacy. The final chapter proposes a new model for understanding the interaction between lay and expert knowledge. This book is essential reading in cultural studies, science studies, history of science and science communication.

Introducing Science through Images

Introducing Science through Images PDF Author: Maria E. Gigante
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178754
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
An examination of how images can serve as communication tools to popularize science in the public eye As funding for basic scientific research becomes increasingly difficult to secure, public support becomes essential. Because of its promise for captivating nonexpert publics, the practice of merging art and imagery with science has been gaining traction in the scientific community. While images have been used with greater frequency in recent years, their value is often viewed as largely superficial. To the contrary, Maria E. Gigante posits in Introducing Science through Images, the value of imagery goes far beyond mere aesthetics—visual elements are powerful communication vehicles. The images examined in this volume, drawn from a wide range of historical periods, serve an introductory function—that is, they appear in a position of primacy relative to text and, like the introduction to a speech, have the potential to make audiences attentive and receptive to the forthcoming content. Gigante calls them "portal" images and explicates their utility in science communication, both to popularize and mystify science in the public eye. Gigante analyzes how science has been represented by various types of portal images: frontispieces, portraits of scientists, popular science magazine covers, and award-winning scientific images from Internet visualization competitions. Using theories of rhetoric and visual communication, she addresses the weak connection between scientific communities and the public and explores how visual elements can best be employed to garner public support for research.

A Companion to the History of Science

A Companion to the History of Science PDF Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118620755
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the History of Science is a single volume companion that discusses the history of science as it is done today, providing a survey of the debates and issues that dominate current scholarly discussion, with contributions from leading international scholars. Provides a single-volume overview of current scholarship in the history of science edited by one of the leading figures in the field Features forty essays by leading international scholars providing an overview of the key debates and developments in the history of science Reflects the shift towards deeper historical contextualization within the field Helps communicate and integrate perspectives from the history of science with other areas of historical inquiry Includes discussion of non-Western themes which are integrated throughout the chapters Divided into four sections based on key analytic categories that reflect new approaches in the field