Description
Book SynopsisPresents a social, cultural, and literary history of this knowledge industry and traces its relationships within 19th-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". This book touches on social and cultural anxieties that offer both historical and contemporary insights.
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
