| Description |
1 online resource (viii, 330 pages) |
| Contents |
Introduction: "sweet science" -- Blake's mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux -- Equivocal life: Goethe's journals on morphology -- Tender semiosis: reading Goethe with Lucretius and Paul de Man -- Growing old together: Lucretian materialism in Shelley's The triumph of life -- A natural history of violence: allegory and atomism in Shelley's The mask of anarchy -- Coda: old materialism, or romantic Marx |
| Summary |
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 Etienne 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 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Blake, William, 1757-1827 -- Criticism and interpretation
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832 -- Criticism and interpretation
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Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822. Masque of anarchy.
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Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822. Triumph of life.
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Lucretius Carus, Titus -- Influence
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| SUBJECT |
Blake, William, 1757-1827 fast |
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832 fast |
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Lucretius Carus, Titus fast |
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Blake, William 1757-1827 gnd |
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De Man, Paul 1919-1983 gnd |
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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749-1832 gnd |
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Lucretius Carus, Titus v94-v55 gnd |
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Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1792-1822 gnd |
|
Masque of anarchy (Shelley, Percy Bysshe) fast |
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Triumph of life (Shelley, Percy Bysshe) fast |
| Subject |
European literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
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Romanticism.
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Materialism in literature.
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Literature and science.
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romanticism (form of expression)
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BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
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European literature
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Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
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Literature and science
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Materialism in literature
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Romanticism
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780226458588 |
|
022645858X |
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