26 July 2013

Review: Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850 by Alice Jenkins

Hardcover, 257 pages
Published 2007
Borrowed from the library
Read September 2012
Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850
by Alice Jenkins

Not a bad book for what it was, but it was less about literature and science than the title implies, and more about just science. The strongest part, I felt, was the reading of Middlemarch, suggesting that Middlemarch's famous "web" could be not (or not just) the web of life, but the field of force, and that field theory makes us skeptical about limits and boundaries-- as does the realist novel (pp. 204-07). The remonstration, though, that the field needs to pay more attention to physical science (life and earth sciences having gotten all the literature and science hype) is worth heeding.

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