You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism focuses on American romantic writers' attempts to theorize aesthetic experience through the language of electricity. In response to scientific and technological developments, most notably the telegraph, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century electrical imagery reflected the mysterious workings of the physical mind as well as the uncertain, sometimes shocking connections between individuals. Writers such as Whitman, Melville, and Douglass drew on images of electricity and telegraphy to describe literature both as the product of specific economic and social conditions and as a means of transcending the individual determined by such conditions. Aesthetic Materialism moves between historical and cultural analysis and close textual reading, challenging readers to see American literature as at once formal and historical and as a product of both aesthetic and material experience.
Heredity: knowledge and power -- Generation, reproduction, evolution -- Heredity in separate domains -- First syntheses -- Heredity, race, and eugenics -- Disciplining heredity -- Heredity and molecular biology -- Gene technology, genomics, postgenomics: attempt at an outlook.
This book illuminates the role of technological stagnation in the decline of the American electric utility industry in the late 1960s and 1970s. Unlike other interpreters of the industry's woes, Professor Hirsh argues that a long and successful history of managing a conventional technology set the stage for the industry's deterioration. After improving steadily for decades, the technology that brought unequalled productivity growth to the industry appeared to stall in the late 1960s, making it impossible to mitigate the economic and regulatory assaults of the 1970s. Unfortunately, most managers did not recognize (or did not want to believe) the severity of the technological problems they faced, and they chose to focus instead on issues (usually financial or public relations) that appeared more manageable. Partly as a result of this lack of attention to technological issues, the industry found itself in the 1980s challenged by the prospects of deregulation and restructuring.
The violence and destruction hiding behind the obsession with immunity Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – Politics of Immunity moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to...
This study explores the ways in which George Eliot's involvement with contemporary scientific theory affected the evolution of her fiction. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Comte, Spencer, Lewes, Bain, Carpenter, von Hartmann and Bernard, Dr Shuttleworth shows how, as Eliot moved from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda, her conception of a conservative, static and hierarchical model of society gave way to a more dynamic model of social and psychological life.
None
Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.