Modernism’s Animal Metaphors
Modernism’s Animal Metaphors Derek Ryan Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938). Cathryn Setz. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. 224. $105.00 (hardback); $24.95 (paperback). The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form. Rachel Murray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $110.00 (hardback); $24.95 (eBook). In his classic essay “Why Look at Animals?,” John Berger speculates that “the first metaphor was animal.” His hunch is that at some point in time human proximity to animals initiated a metaphorical relation through which the earliest questions could be asked about what the human and the nonhuman “shared in common” and “what differentiated them.” But if evidence of the ancient significance of animals for human life can be found in zodiac signs, Hindu mythology and Homer’s Iliad (among a list that is, Berger admits, “endless”), in capitalist modernity this relationship has been ostensibly lost, with animals physically marginalized and psychically co-opted.1 The story of how modernism fits into this sweeping history of metaphor and marginalization is now being told. Scholars of modernist animal studies are interested in how and why creaturely metaphors might reinforce speciesism and be used to dehumanize entire peoples, but also how they can destabilize a sense of human superiority and, perhaps counterintuitively, enhance understandings of nonhuman life.2 In the two excellent books under review here, Cathryn Setz and Rachel Murray intensify and nuance our understanding of animal metaphor and other creaturely tropes across a wide range of experimental writing that engages phenomena specific to the early twentieth century: developments in the biological sciences, [End Page 431] eugenicist discourse, the rise of fascism, and the trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Notably, where Berger turns to cattle and horses, elephants and lions, cats and dogs—encompassing working animals, captivation and domestication—for his evidence, these new accounts direct our attention towards the most commonly overlooked creatures of all. The pages of Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) and The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form are populated by amoebas, fish, lizards, birds, butterflies, ants, caterpillars and worms. Published one year apart in Edinburgh University Press’s “Critical Studies in Modernist Culture” series, edited by Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley, these books sit remarkably well together as evidence of the centrality of animal metaphor to modernism’s experiments in form and its conceptualization of experience. They show how animals inspired, in often surprising and profound ways, what Setz refers to as a “primordialist aesthetics” (10), where writing oozes, buzzes, and flies; or what Murray terms an “entomological aesthetics” (13), in which forms bristle, burst, and swarm. Both monographs are carefully contextualized and elegantly organized, with a precise thematic focus that belies the breadth of material covered across “little magazines” and periodical culture, avant-garde poetry and the modernist novel. While primarily studies in literary aesthetics, they are especially notable for their engagement with the history of science (illustrated through the inclusion of well-chosen images to accompany the detailed discussions). If modernist approaches to animality have, since Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modernist Imagination (1985), been explicitly framed as a response to Darwin, then in Setz’s and Murray’s work we find crucial refinements to modernism’s engagement with evolutionary discourse, including the many now discredited theories that nonetheless fed the modernist imagination with sometimes troubling, often humorous, but always fascinating results.3 Setz’s study is centered on the rich array of animal metaphors that appear throughout the journal transition, which for just over a decade from 1927 onwards served editor Eugene Jolas’s “quest to seek the ‘Revolution of the Word’,” most famously declared in his manifesto of that title (3–4). The book’s first motivating principle is to reclaim the importance of a magazine that has (along with its editor) been too readily dismissed, its reputation dented by the disparaging remarks of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot among many others. Yet despite a relatively small print run and occasionally questionable content, Setz reminds her readers that this lowly creature of modernism in fact circulated a high number of avant-garde works among its twenty-seven issues and more than 4,000 pages...
- Research Article
- 10.1086/675564
- Mar 1, 2014
- Isis
Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsCorrections to this articleErrataPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTina Adcock received her Ph.D. from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. She specializes in the history of science, exploration, and travel in the modern North American Arctic.Gerardo Aldana is Professor of Anthropology and [email protected] at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His interests broadly consider the sciences of ancient Mesoamerica but focus on the astronomy recorded in Mayan hieroglyphic texts. He is working on the historical contextualization of scientific discovery within the Dresden Codex Venus Table.Gerardo Aldana is Professor of Anthropology and [email protected] at UCSB. His interests broadly consider the sciences of ancient Mesoamerica, but focus on the astronomy recorded in Mayan hieroglyphic texts. He is currently working on the historical contextualization of scientific discovery within the Dresden Codex Venus Table.Brian Balmer is Professor of Science Policy Studies in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. His research interests combine historical and sociological approaches and include the history of chemical and biological warfare, the history of the “brain drain,” and the role of volunteers in biomedical research.Trevor Barnes is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research interests are in the history of twentieth-century geographical thought.Richard H. Beyler teaches history of science, intellectual history, and German history at Portland State University in Oregon. His research focuses on the political history of scientific institutions in twentieth-century Germany and on the history of biophysics before the rise of molecular biology.Karin Bijsterveld, a historian, is a professor in the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University. She is the coeditor (with Trevor Pinch) of The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, 2012) and the author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT, 2008).Francesca Bordogna is Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a fellow of the Reilly Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. She is the author of William James at the Boundaries (Chicago, 2008) and is now working on a book on pragmatism in early twentieth-century Italy.Anastasios Brenner is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Paul Valéry—Montpellier 3. His research focuses on the history of philosophy of science, mainly on the French tradition, as well as the current relevance of historical epistemology. His most recent book is Raison scientifique et valeurs humaines (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).Sonja Brentjes is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Her areas of research are the history of science, cartography, and institutions and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in Islamicate societies and the Mediterranean world (8th–17th centuries).John Hedley Brooke is Professor Emeritus of Science and Religion at Oxford University. He has published extensively on history of chemistry, Victorian science, and the historical relations between science and religion. His latest book, edited with Ronald Numbers, is Science and Religion around the World (Oxford, 2011).Mark B. Brown is a professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009), as well as various publications on the politics of expertise, citizen participation, bioethics, climate change, and related topics.Stephen T. Casper ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University. His research focuses on the history of neurology, neuroscience, and physiology, topics on which he has published two books as well as several articles, essays, and reviews.Pratik Chakrabarti, Reader in History at the University of Kent, has published widely on history of science, medicine, and imperialism. His works include Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest, and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics. He is an editor of Social History of Medicine.Cristina Chimisso (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/philosophy/chimisso.shtml) is Senior Lecturer in European Studies and Philosophy at the Open University, United Kingdom. She is the author of Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s (Ashgate, 2008), and Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination (Routledge, 2001).Deborah R. Coen is an associate professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author, most recently, of The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of Chicago Press, 2013).Claudine Cohen, a philosopher and historian of earth and life sciences, holds professorships in science at the EPHE (Life and Earth Science Section) and in the humanities at the EHESS (Center for Language and Arts) in Paris. Her publications include Science, libertinage et clandestinité à l'aube des Lumières: Le transformisme de Telliamed (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), La méthode de Zadig: La trace, le fossile, la preuve (Seuil, 2011), The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myths, and History (Chicago, 2002), and the first translation of Leibniz's Protogaea (with André Wakefield [Chicago, 2008]). In 2012 she was awarded the Eugen Wegmann Prize of the French Geological Society for her work in the history of geosciences.Roger Cooter is Honorary Professor in the Department of History at University College London. His latest book, Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine (Yale, 2013), was written with Claudia Stein. With her he is now working on a study of capitalism, biopolitics, and hygiene in Germany and Britain from the late nineteenth century.Andrew Ede is a historian of science specializing in history of chemistry. He is the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program and also teaches in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.Michael Egan (McMaster University) is the author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007). He is especially interested in the toxic century and is now at work on a global history of mercury pollution since World War II.Roger Emerson is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario, where he taught from 1964 to 1999. He is known for studies of the Scottish Enlightenment. His latest book, published in 2013, is a biography of an amateur scientist, improver, and politician: Archibald Campbell, third Duke of Argyll (1682–1761).Sterling Evans holds the Louise Welsh Chair in Southern Plains and Borderlands History at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include environmental history, agricultural history, and borderlands history of North America and Latin America. He is the author of The Green Republic (1999) and Bound in Twine (2007).Paul Lawrence Farber is Oregon State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He does research on the history of natural history, racism, and evolution. His most recent book is Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas (2011).Steve Fuller holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. He has authored more than twenty books, with two appearing in 2014: The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (with Veronika Lipinska) and Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History.Alan Gabbey is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University. He is completing a book on Spinoza (Oxford University Press) and working on a book on mechanical philosophy in the early modern period.Cathy Gere is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of California, San Diego. She is now working on a book about utilitarianism and the sciences of pain and pleasure.Pamela Gossin, Professor of History of Science and Literary Studies and the Director of Medical and Scientific Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, is writing two essays on nineteenth-century British literature and astronomy and creating a digital archive of the correspondence and scientific and literary essays of John G. Neihardt.Jean-Baptiste Gouyon is a science and technology scholar with a deep interest in the history of science in its public contexts. His research focuses on film, television, and museums as popular scientific media. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of York.Rich Hamerla is Associate Dean of the Honors College and Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. In addition to his work in the history of chemistry, he teaches classes on Weapons of Mass Destruction and science and the Cold War and has publications addressing biological weapons.Darin Hayton is Associate Professor of the History of Science at Haverford College.John Henry is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh. He recently published a collection of earlier research, Religion, Magic, and the Origins of Science in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2012), and an introductory textbook, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Noah Heringman is Professor of English at the University of Missouri. His publications include Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (2004) and Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (2013).Hunter Heyck is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma, where—much to his surprise—he has recently become department chair. His second book, The Age of System: The Rise and Fracture of High Modern Social Science, has just been accepted for publication by Johns Hopkins University Press.Jan P. Hogendijk is a professor of the history of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht. His research interests are the history of the mathematical sciences in ancient Greek and medieval Islamic civilizations and the history of mathematics in the Netherlands between 1600 and 1850.Thierry Hoquet is Professor of Philosophy of Science in the Philosophy Faculty, University of Lyon 3, and a Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He specializes in the history of the life sciences, from Buffon to Darwin. He is currently completing a study on the way sex is variously defined by biologists.David A. Hounshell is Roderick Professor of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (1984), and “Planning and Executing ‘Automation’ at Ford Motor Company, 1945–1965: The Cleveland Engine Plant and Its Consequences,” in Fordism Transformed: The Development of Production Methods in the Automobile Industry, edited by Haruhito Shiomi and Kazuo Wada (Oxford, 1995).James Hull is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia (Kelowna) and an affiliate of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (Toronto). He is Editor of Scientia Canadensis, the journal of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association.Georgia Irby is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include the history of Greek and Roman science and the representation of science, broadly defined, in nonscientific Greco-Roman literature.Douglas M. Jesseph is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis, and numerous articles on mathematics, methodology, and philosophy in the early modern period.Andrew Jewett is Associate Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University and the author of Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, 2012). He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center.Ann Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She works on the history of the physical sciences, engineering, technology, and modern Europe. Her most recent book was: Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge (Duke, 2009)Paul Josephson teaches history at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and is the author of the forthcoming Building a Soviet Arctic.Horst Kant studied physics, history, and philosophy of science. Since 1995 he has been a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His main subjects are history of physics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (especially institutional, social, and biographical aspects) and history of atomic physics.Peter P. Kirschenmann is Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences and Philosophical Ethics at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He has worked on a great variety of philosophical topics; a selection of his published articles can be found in his Science, Nature, and Ethics: Critical Philosophical Studies (Delft: Eburon, 2001).W. R. Laird is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa, where he teaches medieval history and the history of science. He is the author of The Unfinished Mechanics of Giuseppe Moletti (Toronto, 2000) and coeditor (with Sophie Roux) of Mechanics and Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 2008).Christoph Lüthy directs the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is particularly interested in the history of natural philosophy and of scientific iconography. In 2012 he published David Gorlaeus (1591–1612): An Enigmatic Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science (Amsterdam University Press).Robert MacDougall is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario and the author of The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age.Lisa Messeri is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. She is completing a manuscript entitled Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds.Robert G. Morrison is Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Ni˙zām al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (Routledge, 2007).Stephanie Moser is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. She has published widely on the visual representation of archaeology and the portrayal and reception of the ancient world.Adriana Novoa is a cultural historian whose specialty is science in Latin America. She and Alex Levine have coauthored two books about Darwinism in Argentina (From Man to Monkey and Darwinistas!). Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Studies in Context, the Latinoamericanist, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and elsewhere.Benjamin B. Olshin is Associate Professor of Philosophy, History of Science and Technology, and Design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His research areas include the history of cartography and exploration, ancient science and engineering, the philosophy of contemporary physics, and traditional modes of knowledge transmission.John Parascandola taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before serving as Chief of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine and as Public Health Service Historian. He is the author of The Development of American Pharmacology: John J. Abel and the Shaping of a Discipline.Valentina Pugliano is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. Her work focuses on early modern artisanal practices and the interaction between medicine and science in the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Levant.Nicky Reeves is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, where he is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project “The Board of Longitude, 1714–1828: Science, Innovation, and Empire in the Georgian World,” conducted in association with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.Raul Rojas is a professor of computer science in Berlin. He is the founder of the Konrad Zuse Internet Archive, the largest online source of documents and blueprints written or drafted by Konrad Zuse. He is the author of Die Rechenmaschinen von Konrad Zuse (Springer-Verlag, 1998).Nicolaas Rupke is Johnson Professor in the College at Washington and Lee University, having recently retired from the Chair of the History of Science at Göttingen. Among his books are Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago, 2009) and Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago, 2008). He is now working on the non-Darwinian tradition in evolutionary biology.Dr Juanita Feros Ruys is the Director of the University of Sydney Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and is currently investigating Scholastic approaches to demonology. Her study of the late poetic works of Peter Abelard will be published by Palgrave in 2014.Tilman Sauer teaches history of science at the University of Bern and is a Senior Editor with the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.John Scarborough is Professor in the School of Pharmacy and the Departments of History and Classics (quondam) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His books include Roman Medicine (1969; 1976) and Pharmacy and Drug Lore in Antiquity: Greece, Rome, Byzantium (2010). He is coeditor (with Paul T. Keyser) of the Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World (forthcoming).Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His recent books include Madness: A Very Short Introduction, Hysteria: The Disturbing History, and Durkheim and the Law (2nd ed.), with Steven Lukes.J.B. Shank is a graduate of Stanford University with a Ph.D. in European History and Humanities. He is currently completing a book entitled Before Voltaire: Newton, “Newtonianism,” and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.Ruth Lewin Sime is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Sacramento City College. She is the author of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics and is now writing a biographical study of Otto Hahn.Daniel Lord Smail is a professor of history at Harvard University, where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille.Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis is Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. She is the author of Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology. Her interests include the history of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, genetics, and systematics, and she has published extensively in the history of the botanical sciences in North America.Rudolf Werner Soukup, of the Technische Universität Vienna, works on alchemy and early chemistry, chemical research in the Habsburg Monarchy, and Robert Bunsen's library in Althofen. He is the author of Alchemistisches Gold, Paracelsistische Pharmaka (1997), Die wissenschaftliche Welt von gestern (2004), Chemie in Österreich (2007), and Pioniere der Sexualhormonforschung (2010).David Spanagel is an assistant professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His first book (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming) is a study of the political, material, and cultural contexts of geological ideas in New York State during the early nineteenth century, centering on Amos Eaton.Max Stadler is Chair for Science Studies at ETH Zurich. Professor Stadler works on the history of perception, the nervous system, technology and design. He has published extensively on the history of neuroscience.Larry Stewart is Professor of History and Director of the “Situating Science” node at the University of Saskatchewan. He is the author of The Rise of Public Science (1992) and, with Margaret Jacob, Practical Matter (2004), as well as various essays on the dissemination of scientific knowledge since Newton. He is now writing a study of experiment during the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution and is editing, with Erica Dyck, a collection of essays on the use of humans in experiments.Heiko Stoff is Guest Professor for the History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He is the author of Ewige Jugend: Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte Reich (Böhlau, 2004) and Wirkstoffe: Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Hormone, Vitamine und Enzyme, 1920–1970 (Stuttgart, 2012).Bruno J. Strasser is a professor at the University of Geneva and an adjunct professor at Yale University. He is the author of a book on the history of molecular biology in postwar Europe, La fabrique d'une nouvelle science: La biologie moléculaire à l'age aomique, 1945–1964 (Florence, 2006). He is now finishing a book on the history of biomedical collections and databases.Laurence Totelin is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Recipes in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Greece (Brill, 2009).Janet Vertesi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Her recent research examines NASA's robotic space exploration missions; her book, Seeing Like a in on the is forthcoming from the University of Chicago in is a Fellow at the University of Her publications include the book University Press, and several research on the to the of Her current project with the history of is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. His research is on the cultural history of early modern science, the and of His most recent book is The and is Professor of History and Philosophy at State College in New is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and a of early modern and the reception of She is the author of at the Origins of (Oxford, and The World Previous article by of the History of Science Society by The History of Science Society. articles this
- Research Article
- 10.1086/676579
- Jun 1, 2014
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
- Research Article
- 10.1086/666369
- Jun 1, 2012
- Isis
Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
- Research Article
- 10.1086/684808
- Dec 1, 2015
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
- Research Article
- 10.1353/flm.2018.0049
- Dec 1, 2018
- Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Reviewed by: Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria Evans Chad Trevitte Victoria Evans, Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. £75.00. 208 pages. In the interviews Douglas Sirk granted at the end of his career, his early experience as a painter and theatrical director in Weimar Germany allowed him to augment his new reputation as a cinematic artist as well as a progressive social critic. While later studies have challenged any consistent view of him as a subversive auteur, many of the best have continued to combine aesthetic, historical, and political approaches in order to reassess his films within a fuller context. A recent book by Victoria Evans, which largely explores how Sirk’s melodramas are informed by key trends in modernist painting and architecture, offers a valuable contribution to Sirk scholarship by establishing its own links between the visual design of his films and their broader social and political dimensions. The book is organized in three parts, each containing two chapters. The first two chapters evaluate Sirk’s cinematography with reference to painting, with the opening chapter offering an alternative to ironic, Brechtian readings of the director’s signature use of internal framing. Here Evans first reviews Michael Fried’s distinction between “absorptive” and “theatrical” modes of pictorial representation, noting how the former parallels the customary view of melodrama as fostering an unreflective, immersive sort of audience identification, whereas the latter parallels the more distanced critical reflection associated with Brecht’s “alienation effect.” Against this backdrop, Evans then argues that a third mode drawn from Austrian art historian [End Page 61] Alois Riegl—“attentiveness”—overcomes Fried’s dichotomy by allowing a more balanced, dynamic reciprocity between these impulses in the viewer. For Evans, it is this third mode that does fuller justice to the nuanced effects of Sirk’s compositions, and her sustained analysis of the homecoming scene in All I Desire offers one of the finest examples of these effects. In the second chapter Evans turns to the influence of expressionist painting in Sirk’s color design with, among other things, a rather intriguing comparison between Wassily Kandinsky’s color theories and the director’s Technicolor palette in Magnificent Obsession. While Sirk did not name Kandinsky among his artistic influences, the painter’s association of blue with spiritual transformation and white with spiritual rebirth emerges in pivotal moments of Sirk’s film, and Kandinsky’s theosophical background is shown to have its own counterpart in the numinous transcendentalism of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel. Evans explores these affinities within a broader discussion of how Sirk’s expressive color design responds to contemporaneous debates about modern art in the United States, essentially providing a syncretic combination of European high culture and American mass culture that can also be seen in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris. The next two chapters more strongly emphasize social and political themes. Chapter Three, “The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture,” draws on Ben Singer’s analysis of cultural anxieties towards technology in post-WWI melodrama, with The Tarnished Angels serving as the fullest reflection of this theme in Sirk. While Sirk initially struggled to understand the motives of Robert Stack’s self-destructive stunt pilot in the studio script, Evans argues that the director would have found a familiar analog in Ernst Jünger’s cult of the mechanized modern warrior—a proto-fascist vision of perpetually mobilized, technologically advanced masculinity that arose in reaction against the decadence of Weimar culture. Seen in this light, the film steers away from the Faulkner novel’s tragic romanticism, offering in its place a more grounded, humane rebuke of Stack’s neurotic addiction to the euphoria he once felt as a World War I fighter pilot. In the following chapter, Evans offers a comparison of John Stahl’s 1934 version of Imitation of Life with Sirk’s 1959 remake, with particular attention to how the racial divide is reflected in their settings. The key difference explored here is Sirk’s distinctive counterpoint between urban and suburban housing, which Evans situates within the social history of post-New Deal government and commercial policies...
- Research Article
- 10.1086/681984
- Jun 1, 2015
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
- Research Article
- 10.1086/669897
- Mar 1, 2013
- Isis
Notes on Contributors
- Research Article
3
- 10.1177/0306312792022001007
- Feb 1, 1992
- Social Studies of Science
8. As examples I would cite Donald MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain: 1865-1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); many of the articles cited in Steven Shapin, 'History of Science and its Sociological Reconstructions', History of Science, Vol. 20 (1982), 157-211; and the articles of Andy Pickering which were then incorporated into his book on constructing quarks. 9. I made a similar point in Explaining Science (op. cit. note 2, 169-70), in a section titled 'The Argument from Alternative Models'. 10. The primary defender of empiricism among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers of science is Bas van Fraassen: see his The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 11. Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press & Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 413.
- Research Article
- 10.1353/mlr.2022.0038
- Apr 1, 2022
- Modern Language Review
Reviewed by: Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction by Victoria Coulson Jessica Gildersleeve Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction. By Victoria Coulson. (Midcentury Modern Writers) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. x+226 pp. £75. ISBN 978-1-4744-8049-9. Victoria Coulson's monograph is among the first in a new series from Edinburgh University Press. 'Midcentury Modern Writers', under the editorship of the prominent critic of modernism, Irish literature, and psychoanalysis, Maud Ellmann, is devoted to 'restoring undervalued writers, genres, and literary movements' (p. ix). A book, like the present study, devoted to the work of Elizabeth Bowen constitutes a welcome addition to such a project. A range of major publications on Bowen's work has emerged in recent years, including Ellmann's Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Nicola Darwood's A World of Lost Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), my own Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (New York: Brill, 2014), and Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things, edited by myself and Patricia Juliana Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Despite this, as well as the formation of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and its associated journal, the Elizabeth Bowen Review, Bowen still haunts the margins of canonical literature. Although psychoanalytic methods, often with a deconstructive, trauma-informed, or feminist slant, have informed a number of such recent studies, a sole focus on Bowen's work as 'psychoanalytic' may seem curious, given her interest in but apparent lack of explicit commentary on psychoanalysis. Indeed, the short story 'The Cat Jumps' (1934) may at first blush appear to be the only one of her works which directly uses the terms of psychoanalysis—and does so in a satirical manner, as its very modern characters engage in lively discussion about 'Kraffi-Ebing, Freud, Forel, Weiniger and the heterosexual volume of Havelock Ellis' (The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 366). In her private life, too, Bowen appeared to hold some disdain for modern psychology, such that although she visited a psychotherapist, her lover Charles Ritchie observed that the therapist exposed more of his own private feelings to her than she to him. Yet Coulson marks a critical intervention in this interpretation: [End Page 296] she points out that 'the satire of "The Cat Jumps" is directed not at the ideas represented by the volumes stocking the Wrights' library but at the spectacle of their complacent uptake by a social group motivated primarily by a tribal desire to instantiate its intellectual superiority' (p. 13). More importantly, however, she observes more subtle references in Bowen's fiction, non-fiction, and personal writing to psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissism, neurosis, and complexes (pp. 13–14). Given such infiltration of these ideas within her work, as well as the clear impact of personal and historical trauma in her life, including her father's debilitating psychological breakdown and her mother's early death, not to mention two world wars, a study dedicated to psychoanalysis in Bowen, or indeed of Bowen as a '"theorist" of psychic life' (p. 11), therefore represents an important contribution to the field. Following Bowen's favoured tripartite narrative structure, across three sections Coulson maps out Bowen's psychoanalytic representation of 'Development', 'Sexuality', and 'Reproduction; or Legacy', ultimately arguing for a consistent and original advancement of her theorization of these concepts, such that 'there is operative in Bowen's writing a sophisticated implicit account or understanding of psychological development, of sexuality, and of the structure and function of gender identities' (p. 10), as well as how this 'psychodrama of individual development' functions 'in relation to contemporary world-historical events' (p. 17). To do so, Coulson examines a range of Bowen's extensive œuvre of novels and short stories—the fiction—but also makes use of her life writing and critical essays. Yet her psychoanalytic method is peculiarly unmoored: this makes for a more readable text, to be sure, but does leave the study's psychoanalysis methodologically free. Nevertheless, this is a welcome inclusion in the field of Bowen studies, and does much to gather together and reframe some of the disparate themes...
- Research Article
- 10.1353/mod.2013.0104
- Nov 1, 2013
- Modernism/modernity
Reviewed by: Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner's Apprenticeship by Robert Stark Michael Coyle Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner's Apprenticeship. Robert Stark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 230. $112.00 (cloth). Public attention was still simmering over l'affaire Pound in the summer of 1951 when Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound took the kettle off the hob, successfully making the case that questions of poetic achievement are best left to experts. Since that time, while public attention has been desultory at best, experts have argued Pound's achievement in dozens if not scores of ways. None of these arguments—not even those about Pound's anti-Semitism or racism—has been more fundamental to Pound studies than those over the principles by which both individual cantos and indeed the Cantos themselves cohere. Virtually all theses have been hermeneutic. Virtually everyone has pursued the meaning of it all, whether thematic or ideological. What if, instead, we take the title, Cantos, "songs," seriously? What if, anticipating that no two cantos sound alike, we listen for the primary organizing principle for any individual canto in its unique structuring of poetic music and sound? Because Robert Stark's Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition confines itself to Pound's earliest poems it doesn't go even as far as Homage to Propertius (1919), let alone the Cantos. Nevertheless, no academic study has more carefully considered how the sound of Pound's poetry informs its sense. More than that, Stark endeavors to historicize Pound's sound. At times this goal leads to bracing insights, as when he offers that "rhythms are precisely how Pound drafts the poetic and prosaic past into the ambivalent light of contemporaneity" (168). Everyone who has read Pound at all seriously is familiar with his notion of subject rhymes, "the repeat in history." To consider the implication of Stark's work doesn't mean we have to let go of this idea, but it does suggest we might want to revisit our collective sense of how subject rhymes work. In a certain way, this book is a wonderful mess, somewhat scattershot in its theoretical warrants (chiefly Vico, Hegel, and Raymond Williams, although Stark's acknowledgements tell us that "the project began as a comparative study of what I then termed 'picture-thinking' in Hegel, Heidegger, and Gadamer"), and culminating with an appendix on [End Page 783] Aristophanes that accounts for forty-one of the book's 218 pages. Clearly this is a scholar who finds it difficult to contain his enthusiasms, especially his unmistakably abiding interest in the ancients. But Stark nevertheless succeeds in sustaining his principal focus, and he makes space for that focus with an enabling etymological move: the word "jargon" originally meant "birdsong," and Stark contends that-through his studies of the ancients and of the troubadours-Pound was alive to this sense of things. "By considering poetry as a special kind of jargon, I aim," he explains, "to demonstrate a necessary relationship between 'the meaningful and the rhythmic, the transparent and the opaque' in Ezra Pound's poetry and, by implication, in poetry more generally" (14). In fact, Stark affirms, "the idea that the aural and lexical aspects of language must be considered in their correspondence is the datum of Pound's art" (72). This is a stronger position than might be apparent: in offering this connection as a datum-something given or granted-Stark both tables arguments about Pound's success or aspirations and separates them from questions ideological. Stark's fascination with etymology not surprisingly takes him to that Poundian leitmotif, Ford Madox Ford's insistence that writers get "A DICtionary / and learn the meaning of words!"1 In the envoi to his book Stark spends a page teasing out the significance of the word "draft" in Draft of XXX Cantos: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "draft" is a "drawing down," "drawing off"; a "detachment, or selection . . . from a larger body." It is first used in the robust sense, as of a plough's pulling of a load, or "the act of drawing a...
- Research Article
- 10.2979/victorianstudies.61.4.32
- Dec 1, 2019
- Victorian Studies
Reviewed by: Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form by Frederik Van Dam Elsie B. Michie (bio) Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form, by Frederik Van Dam; pp. xi + 180. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, £70.00, £19.99 paper, $120.00, $29.95 paper. Frederik Van Dam’s new book, Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form, resembles classic studies of Trollope that appeared between the 1960s and 1980s: Robert Polhemus’s The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (1968), James Kincaid’s The Novels of Anthony Trollope (1977), Robert Tracy’s Trollope’s Later Novels (1978), and Christopher Herbert’s Trollope and Comic Pleasure (1987). Like these scholars, Van Dam approaches Trollope through close formal readings of a series of novels, mostly lesser-known works, to tease out the implications of Trollope’s famously understated literary practice. I refer to formal readings deliberately, as Van Dam’s seem to be less concerned with style (the word he chooses to describe his book in his main title) than with form and formal structures such as paraphrase and allusion. Anthony Trollope’s Late Style also seems to me less interested in lateness (which Van Dam defines in his introduction, using the work of Theodor Adorno, as a political rather than biographical lateness) than in an earliness that goes back to the classical period. The book is structured around what I consider to be paired chapters. Chapter 1 (the introduction) and chapter 2 (“Getting and Spending”) present both The Way We Live Now (1875) and Ayala’s Angel (1881) as novelistic responses to the economic changes brought about by late capitalism in Victorian Britain, the period of the proliferation of the great commercial millionaires that Harold Perkin describes in The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (1989). Chapters 3 and 4 deal with colonialism and the New Imperialism in the Australian novel John Caldigate (1879), An Old Man’s Love (1884), The American Senator (1877), The Fixed Period (1882), and The Land Leaguers (1883). Chapters 6 and 7 analyze social institutions—education and the law, respectively—in Cousin Henry (1879), Dr. Wortle’s School (1881), Is He Poppenjoy? (1877), and Mr. Scarborough’s Family (1883). The last two chapters focus on tact, chapter 8 in relation to love and chapter 9 in relation to affection and comedy in Is He Poppenjoy?, Marion Fay (1882), and Ayala’s Angel. I have left chapter 5 out of this synopsis, since I read it as both pivotal to the book’s logic and its most unusual chapter. That chapter deals with Trollope’s prose writings rather than his fiction and focuses primarily on his critical essays about, and biography of, Cicero. Referencing Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, among many others, Van Dam here establishes his early claim that Trollope was “an intellectual exile among the elite of his time,” resisting his era’s tendency to privilege Caesar as an emblem of social authority by presenting Cicero as an advocate of civic republicanism (9). This analysis solidifies the arguments at the center of Van Dam’s book: namely, that “Trollope’s late writings are radical, even visionary” (12), that “they experiment with a number of literary conventions in order to articulate a form of subjectivity in which the individual element, agency, has been erased,” and that “these stylistic elements are part of his engagement with modernity” (9). These arguments place Van Dam’s work solidly in the realm of new studies of liberalism, a position that seems to be confirmed by the fact that he and Lauren Goodlad coauthored the essay on “Trollope and Politics” for The Routledge Companion to Anthony Trollope (2017). [End Page 710] Nevertheless, I read the central concerns of Anthony Trollope’s Late Style as less political than formal and less about modernity than about the past. What links the chapters of the book, to my mind, is their consistent turn to formal literary structures that preceded the advent of the novel. These would include the turn to romance and the fantastic in chapter 2, to Jacobean drama in chapter 3, to the carnivalesque, satire, allegory, and...
- Research Article
- 10.1086/681042
- Mar 1, 2015
- Isis
Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJon Agar is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College, London. He is the author of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity/John Wiley, 2012) and The Government Machine (MIT Press, 2003).Jennifer Karns Alexander is a historian of technology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Mantra of Efficiency (Johns Hopkins, 2008), winner of the Society for the History of Technology's Edelstein Prize.Rachel A. Ankeny is a professor in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. She holds a master's in bioethics and a Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science; she specializes in history and philosophy of contemporary biology, particularly genetics, and worked in genetic counseling clinics in the 1980s.Theodore Arabatzis is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. He is the author of Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities (University of Chicago Press, 2006), coeditor of Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Revisited (Routledge, 2012), and coeditor of the journal Metascience.Massimiliano Badino is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and MIT. He has worked on the history and philosophy of modern physics, particularly on Planck's theory of black-body radiation and on Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. His current research project deals with the evolution of the concepts of order and chaos in mathematical physics from the three-body problem to the ergodic theorem.Charlotte Bigg is a historian of science at the CNRS/Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. She has coedited (with Jochen Hennig) Atombilder: Ikonografie des Atoms in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wallstein, 2009) and (with David Aubin and Otto Sibum) The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture (Duke, 2010).Christian Bracco is an associate professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and a member of the team for history of astronomy at the Syrte Laboratory at the Paris Observatory. He specializes in the history of physics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also contributes to pedagogical publications that address historical problematics.Massimo Bucciantini teaches history of science at the University of Siena. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; trans., Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Esperimento Auschwitz / Auschwitz Experiment (Primo Levi Lecture) (Einaudi, 2011), and Il telescopio di Galileo: Una storia europea (with M. Camerota and F. Giudice) (Einaudi, 2012; trans., Harvard University Press, 2015).Adelene Buckland is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King's College, London. She is the author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago, 2013) and coeditor, with Beth Palmer, of A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 (Ashgate, 2011).Conor Burns teaches history of science and technology courses at Ryerson University in Toronto. His current research examines American field sciences in the period 1780–1850, with a particular focus on archaeology and geology.Christián C. Carman is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, and a research member of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). He works on topics related to philosophy of science as well as the history of ancient astronomy.Imogen Clarke is an independent scholar. She is interested in early twentieth-century physics and culture, science publishing, and the ether.Harold J. (Hal) Cook is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He works mainly on early modern science and medicine and has published award-winning books, most recently Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale University Press, 2007).Ruth Schwartz Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor Emerita of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Harvard, 2008). She is working on the sesquicentennial history of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.Brendan Dooley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, Cork. He has previously taught history of knowledge and history of science at Harvard, Notre Dame, and Jacobs University in Bremen. His current publications include Brill's Companion to Renaissance Astrology (2014), Renaissance Now! (Peter Lang, 2014), and A Mattress Maker's Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de' Medici and Livia Vernazza (Harvard, 2014).Sven Dupré is Professor of History of Knowledge at the Freie Universität Berlin and Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is the editor of Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Springer, 2014).Richard England is Dean of the Sandra and Jack Pine Honors College and Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. He is the coeditor (with Jude Nixon) of Victorian Science, Religion, and Natural Theology (2011) and one of three editors preparing an edition of the papers of the Metaphysical Society (1869–1880).James Evans is Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Puget Sound. His research interests include the history of physics from the eighteenth century to the recent past, as well as ancient astronomy.Paul Lawrence Farber is an Oregon State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He has written primarily on the history of natural history and is now working on the tangled questions on race mixing in the first half of the twentieth century. His most recent book is Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas (Johns Hopkins, 2011).Amy E. Foster is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine. Her research includes the history of women and technology, particularly women in the U.S. space program.Craig Fraser is Chair of the International Commission for the History of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His primary field of interest is the history of analysis and mathematical mechanics.Jean-François Gauvin is the Director of Administration for the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Since 2000 he has cowritten and coedited two prize-winning volumes as well as several articles and book reviews dealing with science museums, instruments, and instrument making. He teaches one course per semester at Harvard on the material culture of science.Alexa Geisthövel is a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin. Her work is part of the ERC-funded research project “Ways of Writing: How Physicians Know, 1550–1950.”Francesco Gerali is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. A native Italian who works on the history of the early oil industry, he moved to Mexico in 2011 to study the development of Mexican oil between 1860 and 1920.Yves Gingras ([email protected]) is Professor in the Department of History and Canada Research Chair in History and Sociology of Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He was President of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA) from 1988 to 1993 and Editor of Scientia Canadensis from 1995 to 2000. His most recent books are Sociologie des sciences (Presses Universitaires de France, 2012) and Les derives de l'évaluation de la recherché: Du bon usage de la bibliométrie (Raisons d'Agir, 2013). He is also the editor of Controverses: Accords et désaccords en sciences humaines et sociales (CNRS Éditions, 2014).Leila Gómez is Associate Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literatures at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She specializes in travel writing in Latin America; her publications include La piedra del escándalo: Darwin en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2008), Iluminados y tránsfugas: Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Madrid, 2009), and Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts (Lewisburg, 2011).Christopher D. Green is Professor of Psychology at York University, with cross-appointments to Science and Technology Studies and to Philosophy. His research is focused on turn-of-the-twentieth-century American psychology and on the use of digital methods in the history of science more broadly.Crystal Hall is Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Bowdoin College, where she is building a digital project on Galileo's personal library. She is the author of Galileo's Reading (Cambridge, 2013) and several articles on Galileo and literary studies in journals including Renaissance Quarterly and Quaderni d'Italianistica.Christopher Hamlin is Professor in the Department of History and the graduate program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame and Honorary Professor in the Department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His interests include natural theology, the history of public health, and the history of expertise. His most recent book is More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).John Henry recently retired from the University of Edinburgh, where he had been Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Science Studies Unit. He has published widely in the history of science, including an introductory textbook, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Jonathan B. Imber is Jean Glasscock Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Society since 1998. He is the author of Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine (Princeton University Press, 2008).Catherine Jackson is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has published on Liebig, Hofmann, and nineteenth-century chemical laboratories and is the coeditor, with Hasok Chang, of An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology, and War (2007).Danielle Jacquart is a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), where she holds the chair for “History of Sciences in the Middle Ages.” She is the author of numerous publications on medieval medicine. Among the most recent are “Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Theory,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013); and Recherches médiévales sur la nature humaine: Essais sur la réflexion médicale (SISMEL, 2014).Frank A. J. L. James is Professor of History of Science at the Royal Institution and at University College, London. He recently completed the six-volume edition of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday and is now working on a study of Humphry Davy's practical work.Mark Jenner is Reader in Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. His publications include Londinopolis (Manchester, 2000) and Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (Palgrave, 2007). He completing a book on ideas of cleanliness and dirt in early modern England.Masanori Kaji is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include history of chemistry in Russia and in Japan and environmental history. He is the author of Mendeleev's Discovery of the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements (1997).Vera Keller is an assistant professor at the Robert D. Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. She is the author of over a dozen articles. Her first book, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the role of interest theory in the reshaping of research in early modern Europe.Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a professor in the Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Her recent book, Hands-On Nature Study (2011), won the Margaret Rossiter Prize. She will spend her sabbatical year, 2014–2015, doing research on museum history at various sites, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.Brandon Konoval is on the faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he is cross-appointed in the Arts One Program and the School of Music. He has written most recently on Nietzsche and the Scopes trial for Perspectives on Science (2014) and on the relationship between Nietzsche and Foucault for Nietzsche-Studien (2013).Stefan Krebs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University, is the author of Technikwissenschaft als soziale Praxis (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) and, with Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, and Gijs Mom, of Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel (Oxford University Press, 2014).Kenton Kroker has published on the history of sleep research, experimental psychology, and clinical immunology. His current research project, Epidemic Futures, is a historical reconstruction of the encephalitis lethargica pandemics of the early twentieth century. He is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto.Deepak Kumar teaches history of science and education at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. During the last four decades he has researched and published a great deal on the history of science, technology, and medicine in the context of British India. He is also known for his book Science and the Raj (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2006).Thomas C. Lassman is curator of the post–World War II rocket and missile collection at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. His research interests focus on the history of U.S. industrial and military research and development and the history of weapon systems acquisition in the Department of Defense.Christoph Lehner works on history and philosophy of modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the coordinator of the project “History and Foundations of Quantum Physics.”David Leith is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His main research interests lie in Greco-Roman medicine, in particular its relations to ancient philosophy.Thomas Lessl is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Rhetorical Darwinism: Evolution, Religion, and the Scientific Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012).Mark Madison is Adjunct Professor at Shepherd University and the Chief Historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Conservation Training Center Museum/Archives.Anna Maerker is Senior Lecturer in History of Medicine at King's College, London. She works on the relationship between expertise and material culture in medicine and science and is the author of Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (2013).Jaume Navarro is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is the author, among other works, of A History of the Electron: J. J. and G. P. Thomson (Cambridge, 2012) and coeditor of Research and Pedagogy: A History of Quantum Physics through Its Textbooks (Berlin, 2013).Vivian Nutton is Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine at University College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His recent publications include a revision of his Ancient Medicine (2013), the first English translation and commentary on Galen's Avoiding Distress (2013), and the historical introduction to the 2013 Karger translation of Vesalius's The Fabric of the Human Body.Mary Jo Nye is Professor of History Emerita at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Her most recent book is Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Her current research focuses on patterns of collaboration in twentieth-century chemical sciences.Giuliano Pancaldi is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Darwin in Italy (Indiana, 1991) and Volta (Princeton, 2003). He is now working on a study of the connections between the life sciences and the demographic transition circa 1900.Leigh Penman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Unanticipated Millenniums: Chiliastic Thought in Post-Reformation Lutheranism (Springer, forthcoming) and numerous articles in the areas of early modern religious and intellectual history.Michael Pettit is Associate Professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University. His first book is The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He studies the history of psychology's research methods and ethics, the relationship between scientists and subject populations, the interface between psychology and public policy, and the circulation of psychology in the public sphere.Patricia Princehouse is a member of the Department of History and Director of the Program in Evolutionary Biology, Institute for the Science of Origins, Case Western Reserve University.Monica Saavedra is a research fellow at the Centre for Global Health Histories, University of York. She has worked in the fields of medical anthropology and the history of medicine and has published about vaccination and malaria in former Portuguese India and Portugal.C. F. Salazar, previously the Editor-in-Chief of Brill's New Pauly, is a research associate at both the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on translations of works by Galen and Aetius of Amida, respectively.George Saliba is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University and studies the development of scientific ideas from late antiquity to early modern times. His most recent book is Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007; paperback, 2011).Darya Serykh is a Ph.D. student in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her current research focuses on the production of queer discourses in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.Megan K. Sethi is an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University. Her work examines the educational activities of scientists who promoted nuclear arms control during the early Cold War era. She participated in the Wilson Center's SHAFR Summer Institute on the International History of Nuclear Weapons in 2013.Michael H. Shank is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the coeditor, with David Lindberg, of the Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013).Elise Juzda Smith has written on the history of craniology, anthropometry, and scientific racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently a Teaching and Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.Richard Staley lectures in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Einstein's Generation and the Relativity Revolution (Chicago, 2008), and his current research explores physics and anthropology.Heiko Stoff is Guest Professor for the History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has published on the history of rejuvenation (Ewige Jugend: Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte Reich [Böhlau, 2004]) and the history of biologically active substances (Wirkstoffe: Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Hormone, Vitamine und Enzyme, 1920–1970 [Stuttgart, 2012]). He is the editor, with Alexander von Schwerin and Bettina Wahrig, of Biologics: A History of Agents Made from Living Organisms in the Twentieth Century (Pickering & Chatto, 2013).Liba Taub is Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome, Ancient Meteorology, and Ptolemy's Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy's Astronomy.Jetze Touber is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. His Ph.D. dissertation, on the cult of the saints and law, medicine, and in Rome, has recently been published by His research interests include in the Dutch and and in the of is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of and the author of The Science and Technology is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New and the author of in The of American and the of the and Conservation in America (University of Chicago is Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research focuses on the history of ancient and early modern mechanics and on the between practical and knowledge in the history of a historian of ancient and medieval Islamic and is coordinator of at University and of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of He is author of The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of (Princeton, 2009) and The Art of (Princeton, is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science in the Department of History at University. His research focuses on the early modern between and He has published on the history of and astronomy and is now preparing work on early modern and on the of A. is an assistant professor of history at University and teaches in the industrial archaeology graduate program His work is between early modern and and the history of nineteenth-century American military technology and the that J. is an assistant professor of history at The University of the and the author of The as Scientific and in the Early Enlightenment (Chicago, An early who specializes in the history of science, she has published widely on and and education in the first half of the eighteenth century. She is working on a project about the history of the in early modern is Assistant Professor of History of Art at State University. He is a in medieval and the history of His first book, de and the Medieval in from the Institute in is Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of and Research Associate at King's College, Cambridge. Her current research project focuses on the of culture, medicine, and the role of in science, Previous article by Volume of the History of Science Society on by The History of Science articles
- Research Article
- 10.1086/693342
- Sep 1, 2017
- History of Humanities
Notes on Contributors
- Research Article
- 10.1353/vpr.2018.0056
- Jan 1, 2018
- Victorian Periodicals Review
Reviewed by: Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 by Jonathan Cranfield Emma Liggins (bio) Jonathan Cranfield, Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 254, £75/$120 hardcover, £24.99/$39.95 paperback. As the author of the perennially popular Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle has generated a buoyant critical industry lauding him as one of the masters of Victorian crime fiction. What is often missing from this account is the breadth and variety of the material he produced and, perhaps more importantly, the periodical contexts in which his fictions first appeared. Though he wrote for a number of key magazines of the fin de siècle, including the Windsor Magazine, Conan Doyle's story is inextricable from the story of the Strand Magazine (1891–1949), the middlebrow illustrated monthly that established his reputation. As Jonathan Cranfield claims in the introduction to his timely new study, "The interdependence of Conan Doyle and the Strand's reputations was not an arbitrary occurrence, but instead the symptom of a series of shifts in the production and consumption of popular culture," changes which can explain "how author and publication sought to shepherd a determinedly Victorian audience through the turbulence of the early twentieth century" (1). Cranfield's careful consideration of the development of the Strand between the 1890s and Conan Doyle's death in 1930 allows for a nuanced analysis of "slow transformations in literary form, ideology, cultural attitudes and social values" (2). Chapters are structured primarily around specific decades of the magazine's publication, mapping the author's popularity in different eras and relating this to the genres and materials he produced during his forty-year involvement. Cranfield attends to issues of readership and editor-contributor interchanges as he examines Conan Doyle's evolving relationship with prolific publisher George Newnes and editor H. Greenhough Smith. This builds upon Kate Jackson's important work on Newnes and on the 1890s issues of the Strand. Cranfield's study also places Conan Doyle in relation to key debates about science and modernity, the Boer War, imperialism, spiritualism, and the transformation of the periodical after 1914 into "a vehicle for propaganda" (105). One of the strengths of a broader approach is that due consideration is given to the significant twentieth-century life of the periodical. As recent work on Richard Marsh by Minna Vuohelainen and others has shown, the issues published shortly before, during, and after the First World War have been overshadowed by the Holmes years of the 1890s. Cranfield's parameters allow for a sustained critique of the "Victorianisation" of the Strand and the uneven process by which "its Victorian readers became its Edwardian readers" before having to adapt to the cultural upheaval of the war years and their aftermath (5). [End Page 752] Cranfield adeptly captures the contradictions and complexities of writing for a magazine with an agenda of mass entertainment in uncertain times. His engaging, fluent writing style provides its own form of entertainment, making his analysis both accessible and erudite: like the Strand Magazine, the book includes lots of snippets, strange images, and comic moments set alongside serious intellectual endeavour. Reflecting recent interest in the image/text dynamics of the periodical press, Cranfield pays welcome attention to the magazine's illustrations, which were a key element of its appeal. The excellent introduction, "Periodicals, Popular Writing and Modernism," offers an extended meditation on the meanings of the "popular," popular modernism, and the boundaries between periods, which respond to ongoing debates about radicalism and middlebrow print culture. The third chapter begins to examine Conan Doyle's construction of himself as "post-Victorian" after 1903, a period of experimentation as he considered "which admixture of old and new might best fit the twentieth century" (93). The serialisation of historical fiction such as Sir Nigel (1905–6) is then shown to be "out of place" or "leaden and slow" for Edwardian readers when published alongside articles such as "Across America by Motor-Car" and "Boomerangs and Boomerang Throwing" (94). The chapter focused on the uneasy period leading up to and during the First World War argues that many...
- Dissertation
- 10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.6037
- Jun 2, 2023
In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in examples of Renaissance drama and cultural artifacts. Whiteness exploits this fluidity between animal-human classifications as a power differential. Metaphors of animal-human speciation elicit anxieties around difference through a poetics of contagion. Spread through animal metaphors, animal-human distinctions circulate dehumanizing constructions of race, gender, and sexuality via affective influences in early modern English playhouses and by extension, affects cultural constructions of identitarian difference. England’s emergent settler-colonialist logics in the Renaissance positioned animal-human differences on hierarchies such as the Great Chain of Being where crossing the porous boundary between human and animal constituted a form of contagion. Actors’ imitations of animality through material performance and metaphor on stage spread through spectators’ senses—in other words, theatergoers felt animality as an affective, embodied, and material experience. In this vein, I approach animal studies in dialogue with pre-modern critical race studies, queer theory, and affect studies to address the circulations of difference through contagion and animality in early modern English literature and culture. By close reading dramatic and cultural materials, I argue that animal metaphors in early modern literature and culture represent forms of racial, sexual, and gendered difference in early modern England as something transmittable, showing their incredibly flexible and exploitable capabilities. In other words, the uncertain distinctions between what constructed an “animal” and a “human” were dangerously transmissive in early modern contexts.
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