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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Paperback)
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Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Paperback)
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This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace's
much-cited dream in 1812 of a vast intelligence' which can embrace
in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the
universe and those of the lightest atom' and for which the future
and the past are equally calculable. Laplace sets out the
echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience and the classic
statement of a deterministic universe. The author investigates some
of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of
observation and the universe are at once assimilated and
complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle,
Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. In particular, he aims to
retrace some of the ways in which LaplacianNewtonian models of
scientific intelligence' come to inform nineteenth-century writers'
views of themselves and their own modes of observation. The author
also explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward
to more modern conceptions of science in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, such as Chaos Theory and Einsteinian
Cosmology. Oddly enough, contemporary science would seem to realise
Carlyle's vision of a Natural-Supernaturalism,' fusing Laplace's
mechanical vision with Romanticism. This groundbreaking book covers
a huge array of topics, including philosophy, Wagnerian
music-drama, Jungian analysis, and it ends with the supposedly
"omniscient" narrator in Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop,
as an example of what came to be the dominant mode of narration in
later Victorian fiction.
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