Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter - Hardcover

Beer, Gillian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198183690 ISBN 13: 9780198183693

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1996

Synopsis

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 Gillian Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of chance, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of essays centres on Darwin and the incentives of his thinking, from language theory to his encounters with Fuegians. Other essays include 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.

About this title

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 "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 "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 "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

About the Author

Gillian Beer is at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0198183690
• ISBN 13: 9780198183693
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352