Romanticism and Science

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is perhaps the best-known and most widely studied literary representation of science. Yet it is by no means the only text of its time to fictionalise the latest experiments and discoveries of natural philosophers. Science was burgeoning in the years 1760-1840. It was professionalizing fast, and revolutionizing people's understanding of their world and where they stood in it. Astronomers demonstrated that earth was merely one of an almost infinite number of worlds. Geologists, meanwhile, showed the earth itself was billions of years old. The strange dinosaur fossils they dug from the strata fed the imagination of Tennyson and Dickens, amongst others, with disturbing questions about the origin of man and the nature of God. Whilst geologists dug deep into time, chemists and physicists were reshaping space. Davy, Oersted and Faraday showed that electricity moved and changed matter from a distance. Galvani and Aldini demonstrated it could animate corpses. To many, including Coleridge and Shelley, electricity promised to unlock the secret of the life-force itself. This five volume set is divided into sections by scientific discipline, each illuminating a context of current interest to literary scholars. An extensive introduction is included in the first volume giving a brief history of the development of each field, resumes of the central texts/discoveries and their significance, and an account of their impact on literature - and sometimes, literature's impact on science. A bibliography of major scientific works with suggestions for further reading is also provided and the set is completed with a detailed index. The set is divided as follows: Volume 1: Science and Politics; Medicine; Mesmerism; Electricity/Electro-Chemistry/Galvanism and Magnetism Volume 2: Chemistry; Heat and Light Volume 3: Astronomy; Mensuration/Instruments; Women in Science; Science and Social Change; Institutionalisation; Philosophy of Science and Engineering and Technology Volume 4: Manufactures; Botany; Natural History and Meteorology; Exploration and the Races of Humankind: Craniology, Physiognomy, Phrenology Volume 5: Theories of Life; Comparative Anatomy and Geology/Palaeontology