Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter - Softcover

Beer, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198186355 ISBN 13: 9780198186359

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1999

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, Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of change, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of the essays centers on Darwin; other essays look at 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

About the Author:

Gillian Beer is at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0198186355
• ISBN 13: 9780198186359
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352