Description
Book SynopsisFact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today.
Trade Review‘The contributions succeed in both advancing understandings of historical processes of disciplinary differentiation and integration from the eighteenth century onwards and in introducing new perspectives on perennial debates concerning the potential value of literary cultures to the production of scientific knowledge. For this, perhaps above all else, the volume deserves a wide readership.’ -- Steve Howe * European Romantic Review vol 28:04:2017 *
‘This collected volume presents a timely intervention into current disciplinary debates about the humanities and sciences…Fact and Fiction is an excellent example of interdisciplinary work in humanities.’ -- Yevgenya Strakovsky * Monatshefte vol 110:01:2018 *
"This volume should be welcomed as an essential contribution to inter-disciplinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies… It is an exemplary instance of the translation of a symposium into a published work and will be appreciated by researchers and advanced students of historical cultural studies in Europe as well as specialists in the question of literature and science." -- Joseph D. O'Neil, University of Kentucky * University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain Thoughts on a Contentious Relationship Christine Lehleiter PART I Reading: Electricity, Medicine 1 Facts Are What One Makes of Them: Constructing the Faktum in the Enlightenment and Early German Romanticism Jocelyn Holland 2 The Competing Structures of Signification in Samuel Hahnemann's Homeopathy: Between 18th-century Semiosis and Romantic Hermeneutics Alice Kuzniar PART II Imagining: Botany, Chemistry, Thermodynamics 3 "She comes! - the GODDESS!": Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791) Ann Shteir 4 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften: The Career of a Metaphor Christian Weber 5 Physics Disarmed: Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of James Clerk Maxwell and George Eliot Tina Young Choi PART III Sensing: Anthropology, Psychology, Aesthetics 6 Herder's Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and Fiction John K. Noyes 7 Fictional Feedback: Empirical Souls and Self-Deception in the Magazine for Empirical Psychology and Beyond Michael House 8 Fictional Feelings Psychological Aesthetics and the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure Tobias Wilke PART IV Relating: Biology 9 Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of Religion Stefani Engelstein 10 Kin Selection, Mendel's "Salutary Principle," and the Fate of Characters in Forster's Longest Journey Daniel Aureliano Newman PART V Displaying: Scientific Collections 11 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind: Science, the Body and Language in the Writings of Durs Grunbein and Thomas Hettche Peter M. McIsaac 12 Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic Performers in Nineteenth-Century German Exhibition Culture Dana Weber
