Sweet Science

Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, British, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Science, Other Sciences, History
Cover of the book Sweet Science by Amanda Jo Goldstein, University of Chicago Press
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
Author: Amanda Jo Goldstein ISBN: 9780226458588
Publisher: University of Chicago Press Publication: July 10, 2017
Imprint: University of Chicago Press Language: English
Author: Amanda Jo Goldstein
ISBN: 9780226458588
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication: July 10, 2017
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Language: English

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry.

Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry.

Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.

More books from University of Chicago Press

Cover of the book Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Darwin Deleted by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Jellyfish by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Documenting the World by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Murder in Ancient China by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Thirty Years of Phoenix Poets, 1983 to 2012 by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Democracy in America by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Teachers of the People by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book The Body in the Mind by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Authoritarianism by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book The Refracted Muse by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book Rum Maniacs by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book A Bird in the House by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes by Amanda Jo Goldstein
Cover of the book The Bilingual Courtroom by Amanda Jo Goldstein
We use our own "cookies" and third party cookies to improve services and to see statistical information. By using this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy