Transactions and Encounters : Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

by Edited by Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh

• ISBN13: 9780719059117
• ISBN10: 0719059119
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2002-11-09
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

Transactions and Encountersexamines a diverse range of emerging technologies in the Victorian era. Such topics are explored as the popular craze for microscopes; the uncanny possibilities of the telephone; the jostling for authority between literature and science, with scenes by and including Dickens and Lewes, Huxley and Gosse; the weird imaginary around androgynous barnacles; and the competing versions of a mind-reading act. These essays combine to produce an invigorating and involving attempt to re-cast understandings of 19th century encounters between the cultural and scientific spheres.

Author Biography

Roger Luckhurst is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Josephine McDonagh is Reader in Romantic and Victorian Culture at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Table of Contents

List of figures	vi
List of contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction: `encountering science'	1	(15)
Roger Luckhurst
Josephine McDonagh
Voice, technology and the Victorian ear	16	(14)
Steven Connor
The microscope: mediations of the sub-visible world	30	(25)
Isobel Amstrong
`Thinking blues': the memory of colour in nineteenth-century photography	55	(20)
Lindsay Smith
Cross-cultural encounters: the co-production of science and literature in mid-Victorian periodicals	75	(21)
Paul White
Imitation of life: science, literature and the dissemination of culture	96	(21)
David Amigoni
Passages in the invention of the psyche: mind-reading in London, 1881-84	117	(34)
Roger Luckhurst
Darwin's barnacles: mid-century Victorian natural history and the marine grotesque	151	(31)
Rebecca Stott
Woman's Share in Primitive Culture: science, femininity and anthropological knowledge	182	(22)
Lynnette Turner
From The New Werther to numbers and arguments: Karl Pearson's eugenics	204	(29)
Carolyn Burdett
Index	233