Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T19:10:49.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Scientific models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Joel Black
Edited by
Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Get access

Summary

Poetic metaphors and scientific models

The century and a half preceding the Romantic period was marked not only by an unprecedented succession of major scientific discoveries, but also by the rise of entirely new domains of scientific knowledge. From Newtonian mechanics to chemistry, from biology to psychology, each new field disclosed natural phenomena that were increasingly inaccessible to ordinary human observation. Such phenomena had to be apprehended through technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes), and were often only comprehended through the use of mathematical formulas and conceptual models.

Amidst this growing scientific abstraction, Romantic writers have been seen as conducting a valiant but ultimately futile crusade to save the appearances. Goethe insisted that natural objects should not merely be studied objectively – ‘in themselves and in their relation to each other’ – but viewed in relation to the observers themselves. Blake bitterly denounced Newton's mechanistic world-view, and even Coleridge, while professing admiration for Newton's scientific discoveries, deplored the passivity of corporeal bodies in Newton's scheme of nature and, what for him was worse, the passivity of Newton's concept of the mind itself. ‘[T]he Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton’, he wrote, adding that ‘Newton was a mere materialist – Mind in his system is always passive – a lazy looker-on on an external World.’ The Romantics' suspicion of a scientific approach to nature is best expressed in Wordsworth's line, ‘we murder to dissect’.

Yet such criticism of Newtonian abstraction and materialism does not mean that the Romantics were hostile to science itself.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 115 - 137
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrams, M. H., Natural supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in Romantic literature, New York: Norton, 1971.Google Scholar
Abrams, Meyer H., The mirror and the lamp: Romantic theory and the critical tradition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Almeida, Hermione, Romantic medicine and John Keats, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Amrine, Frederick, Zucker, Francis J. and Wheeler, Harvey (eds.), Goethe and the sciences: a reappraisal, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Wilda C., Between the library and the laboratory: the language of chemistry in eighteenth-century France, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Ault, Donald, Visionary physics: Blake's response to Newton, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Barfield, Owen, Saving the appearances: a study in idolatry, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Bhéguin, Albert, L'ame romantique et le rêve: essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française, Paris: Corti, 1946.Google Scholar
Bietak, Wilhelm, Romantische Wissenschaft, Deutsche Literatur, ser. 17, vol. 13, Leipzig: Reclam, 1940.Google Scholar
Black, Max, Models and metaphors: studies in language and philosophy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Bohler, Michael, ‘Naturwissenschaft und Dichtung bei Goethe’, in Wittkowski, Wolfgang (ed.), Goethe im Kontext: Kunst und Humanität, Naturwissenschaft und Politik von der Aufklärung bis zur Restauration, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984.Google Scholar
Böhme, Jakob, Sämmtliche Werke, Schiebler, K. W. (ed.), 7 vols., Leipzig: Barth, 1922.Google Scholar
Bonfiglio, Thomas P., ‘Electric affinities: Arnim and Schellings Naturphilosophie’, Euphorion 81 (1987).Google Scholar
Bono, James J., ‘Science, discourse, and literature: the role/rule of metaphor in science’, in Literature and science: theory and practice, Peterfreund, Stuart (ed.), Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Brown, Jane K. ‘The theatrical mission of the Lehrjahre’, Goethe's narrative fiction: the Irvine Goethe symposium, Lillyman, William J. (ed.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983.Google Scholar
Brown, Marshall, The shape of German Romanticism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Burwick, Frederick, ‘Elektrizität und Optik: zu den Beziehungen zwischen wissenschaftlichen und literarischen Schriften Achim von Arnims’, Aurora 46 (1986).Google Scholar
Burwick, Frederick, The damnation of Newton: Goethe's color theory and Romantic perception, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burwick, Frederick (ed.), Approaches to organic form: permutations in science and culture, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bush, Douglas, Science and English poetry: a historical sketch, 1590–1950, New York: Oxford University Press, 1950.Google Scholar
Carus, Carl Gustav, Psyche: zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele, Pforzheim: Flammer und Hoffmann, 1846.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel T., The friend, Rooke, Barbara E. (ed.), 2 vols., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Griggs, E. L. (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1956–71.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. V: Lectures 1808–19 on literature, Foakes, R. H. (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, 16 vols.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coburn, Kathleen (ed.), 5 vols., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–.Google Scholar
ColeridgeTaylor, Samuel, The notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coburn, Kathleen (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Andrew and Jardine, Nicholas (eds.), Romanticism and the sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
De Quincey, Thomas, The collected writings of Thomas de Quincey, new edn, Masson, David (ed.), 14 vols., Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1889–90.Google Scholar
Devlin, D. D., De Quincey, Wordsworth and the art of prose, London, Macmillan, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eichner, Hans, ‘The rise of modern science and the genesis of Romanticism,’ PMLA 97 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellenberger, Henri F., The discovery of the unconscious: the history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry, New York: Basic Books, 1970.Google Scholar
Fink, Karl J., Goethe's history of science, Cambridge University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund, The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Strachey, James (trans.), London: The Hogarth Press, 1958.Google Scholar
Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, The androgyne in German Romanticism: Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and the metaphysics of love, New York: Lang, 1983.Google Scholar
Georges, Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, Arthur Goldhammer (trans.),Cambridge, ma: The MIT Press 1988Google Scholar
Gode, Alexander, Natural science in German Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, Leopoldina-Ausgabe, Gunther Schmid (ed.), Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1947–.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Elective affinities: a novel, Constantine, David (ed. and trans.), Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Goethe's botanical writings, Mueller, Bertha (trans.), Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Goethe's color theory, Aach, Herb (ed. and trans.), New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Richter, Karl (ed.), 21 vols., Munich: Hanser, 1985–96.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Scientific studies, Miller, Douglas (ed. and trans.), New York: Suhrkamp, 1988.Google Scholar
Grabo, Carl Henry, A Newton among poets: Shelley's use of science in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1930.Google Scholar
Hall, Jason Y., ‘Gall's phrenology; a Romantic psychology’, Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harold, Bloom and Lionel, Trilling, Romantic poetry and prose, New York, Oxford University Press 1973Google Scholar
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Sämmtliche Werke, Suphan, Bernhard Ludwig (ed.), 33 vols., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967–8.Google Scholar
Jean-Edouard, Spenlé, Essais sur l'idéalisme romantique en Allemagne, Paris, Hachette 1904Google Scholar
Joel, Black, ‘The hermeneutics of extinction: denial and discovery in scientific literature’, Comparative criticism, 13, ShaCer, E. S. (ed.), Cambridge University Press 1991Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel, Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1910–83.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel, Lectures on metaphysics, Ameriks, Karl and Naragon, Steve (eds. and trans.), Cambridge University Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel, Metaphysical foundations of natural science, Ellington, James (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.Google Scholar
Kapitza, Peter, Die frühromantische Theorie der Mischung: über den Zusammenhang von romantischer Dichtungstheorie und zeitgenössischer Chemie, Munich: Hueber, 1968.Google Scholar
King-Hele, Desmond, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic poets, London: Macmillan, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, D. M., ‘The physical sciences and the Romantic movement’, History of science 9 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Nancy, Jean-Luc, The literary absolute: the theory of literature in early German Romanticism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors we live by, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Lenoir, Timothy, The strategy of life: teleology and mechanics in nineteenth-century German biology, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982.Google Scholar
Levere, Trevor Harvey, Poetry realized in nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and early nineteenth-century science, Cambridge University Press, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levine, George (ed.), Realism and representation: essays on the problem of realism in relation to science, literature and culture, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Londa, Schiebinger, “”, The mind has no sex?, Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1989Google Scholar
Lyon, Judson S., ‘Romantic psychology and the inner senses: Coleridge’, PMLA 81 (1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Man, Paul, Blindness and insight, expanded edition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Man, Paul, The rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Michael, Drosnin, The Bible code, New York, Simon & Schuster 1997Google Scholar
Michel, Foucault's, explanation in The order of things, (New York, Random House 1970).Google Scholar
Modiano, Raimonda, Coleridge and the concept of nature, Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller-Sievers, Helmut, Self-generation: biology, philosophy and literature around 1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Nicholas, A., Rupke, ‘Caves, fossils, and the history of the earth’, in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine Romanticism and the sciences, Cambridge University Press 1990Google Scholar
Nisbet, Hugh Barr, Goethe and the scientific tradition, London: University of London, 1972.Google Scholar
Novalis, , Philosophical writings, Stoljar, Margaret Mahony (trans.), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Novalis, , Schriften: die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, Kluckhohn, Paul and Samuel, Richard H. (eds.), 5 vols., Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–88.Google Scholar
Novalis, , Schriften: die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, vol. II: Das philosophische Werk, Samuel, Richard H., Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Schulz, G. (eds.), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965.Google Scholar
OrsiniGiordano, G. N., Organic unity in ancient and later poetics: the philosophical foundations of literary criticism, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Ortony, Andrew (ed.), Metaphor and thought, Cambridge University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paul, Dumouchel, ‘The role of fiction in evolutionary biology’, SubStance 71/2(1993)Google Scholar
Poggi, Stefano and Maurizio, (eds.), Romanticism in science: science in Europe, 1790–1840, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proffitt, Edward, ‘Science and Romanticism’, The Georgia review 34 (1980).Google Scholar
Puppo, Mario, ‘Letteratura e scienza nell'età del romanticismo’, in Letteratura e scienza nella storia della cultura italiana: atti del IX congresso dell'Associazione internazionale per gli studi di lingua e letteratura italiana, 1976, Palermo: Manfredi, 1978.Google Scholar
Ronald, H., Brady‘Form and cause in Goethe's morphology’in Goethe and the sciences, Frederick, AmrineFrancis, J., ZuckerHarvey, Wheeler (eds.), Dordrecht: Reidel 1987Google Scholar
Saul, Nicholas (ed.), Die deutsche literarische Romantik und die Wissenschaften, Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 1991.Google Scholar
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Sämmtliche Werke, Schelling, Karl Friedrich August (ed.), 14 vols., Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61.Google Scholar
Schlegel, Friedrich, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Behler, Ernst (ed.), 35 vols., Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–79.Google Scholar
Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, Dresden: Arnold, 1808.Google Scholar
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein: the 1818 text, contexts, nineteenth-century responses, modern criticism, Hunter, J. Paul (ed.), New York: Norton, 1996.Google Scholar
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Defence of poetry’, in Shelley's prose, or the trumpet of a prophecy, Clark, David Lee (ed.), New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988.Google Scholar
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Essay on Christianity’, in Shelley's prose, or the trumpet of a prophecy, Clark, David Lee (ed.), New York: New Amsterdam, 1988.Google Scholar
Snelders, H. A. M., ‘Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the inorganic natural sciences 1787–1840: an introductory survey’, Studies in Romanticism 9 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephen, Jay, Gould, ‘The child as man's real father’, in Ever since Darwin, New York, Norton, 1977Google Scholar
Stephen, Spender, The struggle of the modern, London, Hamish Hamilton 1963Google Scholar
Stephenson, R. H., Goethe's conception of knowledge and science, Edinburgh University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Thomas, Laqueur, “”, Making sex,Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1990Google Scholar
Thomas, Sprat, The history of the Royal Society of London, London, 1667Google Scholar
Underwood, Ted, ‘The science in Shelley's theory of poetry’, Modern language quarterly 58 (1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vico, Giambattista, The new science of Giambattista Vico, Bergin, Thomas Goddard and Fisch, Max Harold (eds. and trans.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Wessell, Leonard P., The philosophical background to Friedrich Schiller's aesthetics of living form, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1982.Google Scholar
Wetzels, Walter D., ‘Aspects of natural science in German Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism 10 (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wetzels, Walter D., Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Physik im Wirkungsfeld der deutschen Romantik, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the modern world, New York: Macmillan, 1925.Google Scholar
Whyte, Lancelot Law, The unconscious before Freud, London: Freidmann, 1978.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, W. K., ‘Organic form: some questions about a metaphor’, in Romanticism: vistas, instances, continuities, Thorburn, David and Hartman, Geoffrey (eds.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William, Preface to Lyrical ballads, in The prose works of William Wordsworth, Owen, W. J. B. and Smyser, Jane Worthington (eds.), 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, IGoogle Scholar
Wyatt, John, Wordsworth and the geologists, Cambridge University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Wylie, Ian, Young Coleridge and the philosophers of nature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Ziolkowski, Theodore, German Romanticism and its institutions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Scientific models
  • Edited by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300100.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Scientific models
  • Edited by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300100.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Scientific models
  • Edited by Marshall Brown, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300100.008
Available formats
×