Literary Criticism
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Jonathan Taylor is lecturer in English at Loughborough University, with specialisms in nineteenth-century literature and creative writing. He is the author of Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003), and is co-editor of Figures of Heresy (Sussex Academic Press, 2005). He is the author of various essays and journal articles. He also writes for radio, and is currently writing a novel–memoir about his father.
This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace’s
much-cited dream in 1812 of ‘a vast intelligence’ which
can ‘embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest
bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom’ and
for which the future and the past are equally calculable. Laplace
sets out the echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience
and the classic statement of a deterministic universe. The author
investigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian
models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and
complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke,
Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. In particular, it aims to retrace some
of the ways in which Laplacian–Newtonian models of scientific
‘intelligence’ come to inform nineteenth-century writers’
views of themselves and their own modes of observation.
The author also explains how some of these literary reimaginings
look forward to more modern conceptions of science in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, such as Chaos Theory and Einsteinian
Cosmology. Oddly enough, contemporary science would seem to realise
Carlyle’s vision of a ‘Natural-Supernaturalism,’
fusing Laplace’s mechanical vision with Romanticism. This
book covers a vast array of topics, including Philosophy, Wagner’s
music and music in general, Jungian analysis, and ends with the
“omniscient” narrator in Charles Dickens’s The
Old Curiosity Shop, as an example of what came to be the dominant
mode of narration in later Victorian fiction.
| Hardback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-125-2 |
| Hardback Price: | £49.95 / $69.95 |
| Release Date: | September 2007 |
| Paperback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-647-9 |
| Paperback Price: | £25.00 / $34.95 |
| Release Date: | November 2014 |
| Page Extent / Format: | 224 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
| Illustrated: | No |
Acknowledgements
Introduction On Celestial Omniscience and Laplace
1. On History, Chaos and Carlyle
I Deterministic History
II Democratic History
III Fractal History
2. On Cosmology, Heresy, Abbott and Poe
I Deistic Cosmology
II Heretical Cosmology
III Revolutionary Cosmology
3. On Microcosms, Macrocosms and the Music of the
Spheres
I Connections, Analogies and Similarities
II Solipsistic Music
III Microcosmic Music
IV Macrocosmic Music
Afterword On Demonic Omniscience and Dickens
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Taylor challenges
the conventional view that science evolved steadily from the determinism
of the 19th century to the uncertainty and chaos of the 20th. He
shows how some of the most now-lampooned scientists of the Victorian
era in fact admitted that the human mind highly influenced the understanding
of the universe, and how artists widely portrayed science as malleable
to desire and prejudice.
Reference & Research Book
News
In Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century
Literature, Jonathan Taylor demonstrates the ways in which
various Romantic and Victorian writers absorbed and complicated
the ideas of scientific omniscience. In particular, Taylor shows
how Pierre-Simon Laplace’s and Isaac Newton’s sense
of the universe allowed these writers to reimagine themselves and
reshape their writing. He also sees a continuity between these ideas
and modern scientific thought, especially the branch dealing with
Chaos Theory.
Studies in English Literature
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