Chaos and Cosmos: Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century - Softcover

Scott, Heidi C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 027106384X ISBN 13: 9780271063843

Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

About this title

About the Author

Heidi C. M. Scott is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 027106384X
• ISBN 13: 9780271063843
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220