{"product_id":"the-age-of-analogy-9781421436326","title":"The Age of Analogy","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did literature shape nineteenth-century science?Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected journals (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle) and for his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths argues that the Darwins' writing style was profoundly influenced by the poets, novelists, and historians of their era. The Darwins, like other scientists of the time, labored to refashion contemporary literary models into a new mode of narrative analysis that could address the contingent world disclosed by contemporary natural science. By employing vivid language and experimenting with a variety of different genres, these writers gave rise to a new relational study \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[A] serious, detailed, and convincing account with few unexplored avenues. Recommended.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy \u003c\/i\u003erepresents a valuable contribution to scholarship on literature and science. Building on the established models of new historicism and of Gillian Beer's foundational work on Darwinism, it nonetheless offers something new by asking researchers in this field to think more carefully about the kinds of historicism that operate both in their own work and in nineteenth-century literary and scientific writing.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eReview of English Studies\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e is perhaps the most ambitious and important book on the entanglement of nineteenth-century scientific culture and literature to have been written this century—in a field of highly ambitious and truly important books. But it also elucidates the entanglement of nineteenth-century culture with our own, bringing light to contemporary historicist practices, particularly in literary studies.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eIsis\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor those interested in either of the intertwined histories of literature and science—or in what we might more generously call the intellectual culture of the 1780s through the 1850s—Griffiths' book is both readable and richly rewarding.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eReview 19\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis ambitious work should shape future thinking about historicism, science and literature in the nineteenth century and beyond in new and significant ways. Griffiths deserves to be congratulated on having achieved this and, in the process, on having written some of the best recent criticism on Charles Darwin and George Eliot in particular, which is no mean feat in itself.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBritish Society for Literature and Science\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe book is well written and the richness of the study is impressive. It is precisely because of this wide-ranging approach that \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e demonstrates so convincingly that, while the scholarship on analogy is not new, Griffiths takes it to another level where he explores events in a pluralist state of time. This, he terms comparative historicism. As such, \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e makes a valuable contribution to the humanities and sciences.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eMetascience\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e promises to transform our understanding of literary and scientific history in the Anthropocene. This is a big, challenging, eloquent book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNineteenth-Century Contexts\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Griffiths builds his argument and examines his literary examples, he, in effect, applies the analogical paradigm he theorized in the opening chapters, generating a compelling set of insights into modes of thought that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of which continue to shape and define our own times. A necessary intervention.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eJournal of British Studies\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[A] deeply impressive book.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmbitious in its scope and vision and eloquently written, \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e is a challenging and thought-provoking study that gives us new and enriching ways to read nineteenth-century intellectual history\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eDickens Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat is exhilarating about \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e is its bold insistence upon the utility of imaginative literary form as an active agent in science, with the power not only to reflect knowledge of the world but to add to it as well.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLiterature and History\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA book of enormous erudition, especially for a first book. Great books change how criticism does its business, this happens far more rarely than one might think.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWordsworth Circle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e promises to transform our understanding of literary and scientific history in the Anthropocene. This is a big, challenging, eloquent book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNineteenth-Century Contexts\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDevin Griffith's multifaceted, richly textured \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy \u003c\/i\u003eargues that the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new mode of engaging with history—'comparative historicism'—that increasingly fostered what Griffiths calls a 'flat' view of temporal existence. Griffith's method exemplifies the same kind of analogical reasoning that his book investigates. In most cases, it does this with remarkable success, furnishing the field of Victorian science and literature with some truly fresh inspiration and insight.\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eVictorian Studies\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is clarifying and invigorating to have a scholar as searching and well-read as Devin Griffiths address the problem of analogy head on. He ambitiously tracks analogy as an evolving mode of thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on analogy as a method central to the emerging field of comparative historicism . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e is an impressive book that refuses to shy away from a topic as daunting as analogy just because it threatens to become unwieldy. Griffiths is unusually generous in the alacrity with which he maps the questions that interest him onto a huge range of scholarly fields, including linguistics, mathematics, publishing history, botany, comparative anatomy, astronomy, and musical theory.\u003cbr\u003e—Anna Henchman, Boston University, \u003ci\u003eVictorian Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e brims with original arguments and demonstrates Griffiths's impressive range and dexterity in a wide variety of fields and discourses.\u003cbr\u003e—Adam Sneed, Southwest Tennessee Community College, \u003ci\u003eStudies in Romanticism\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDevin Griffiths's excellent \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins\u003c\/i\u003e makes a compelling case for the importance of literary language to the development of scientific theory and practice . . . [\u003ci\u003eThe Age of Analogy\u003c\/i\u003e] demonstrates an encyclopedic grasp of everything from set theory to Saussurian semiotics . . . As Griffiths so masterfully demonstrates, analogy helps us extend our imaginative apprehension of the world's past and present—as well as its possible futures.\u003cbr\u003e—Ella Mershon, Marquette University, \u003ci\u003eModern Philology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction: Analogy under a Different Form\u003cbr\u003ePrelude: Thinking through Analogy\u003cbr\u003e1. Erasmus Darwin, Enlightenment History, and the Crisis of Analogy\u003cbr\u003e2. Crossing the Border with Walter Scott\u003cbr\u003e3. Spooky Action in Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H.\u003cbr\u003e4. Falsifying George Eliot\u003cbr\u003e5. The Origin of Charles Darwin's Orchids\u003cbr\u003eCoda: Climate Science and the \"No-Analog Future\"\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eBibliography\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Johns Hopkins University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49408136085847,"sku":"9781421436326","price":27.45,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781421436326.jpg?v=1730501716","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-age-of-analogy-9781421436326","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}