Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, this book focuses on the importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. It presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature.
Trade Review“
Useful Knowledge can stand as a model of informed and scrupulous historicism. The breadth of Rauch’s acquaintance with subliterary and paraliterary texts is truly impressive as he clearly lays out what was at stake for nineteenth-century intellectuals and usefully relates their preoccupations with those that concern us now, as we experience another information revolution.”—Harriet Ritvo, author of
The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination “A welcome addition to humanistic analyses of science-in-culture. Rauch deftly blends science, history, and literature—novels, speculative fiction, encyclopedias—to explore cultural attitudes to the challenges of new knowledge during the Information Age of the early nineteenth century.”—Ann B. Shteir, York University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: Knowledge and the Novel
1. Food for Thought: The Dissemination of Knowledge in the Early Nineteenth Century
2. Science in the Popular Novel: Jane Webb Loudon’s
The Mummy! 3. The Monstrous Body of Knowledge: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein 4. Lessons Learned in Class: Charlotte Brontë’s
The Professor 5. The Tailor Transformed: Charles Kingsley’s
Alton Locke 6. Destiny as an Unmapped River: George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss Notes
Bibliography
Index
