A01=Amanda Jo Goldstein
allegory
atomism
Author_Amanda Jo Goldstein
baumeister
biology
Category=DSB
criticism
de rerum natura
embryogenesis
empiricism
enlightenment
epigenesis
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
erasmus darwin
etienne geoffroy saint-hilaire
goethe
inquiry
jean-baptiste lamarck
jg herder
journals
justice
knowledge
life writing
literature
Lucretius
marx
masque of anarchy
materialism
nature
nonfiction
on morphology
paul man
phenomenality
poetry
power
Romanticism
science
shelley
violence
William Blake
Product details
- ISBN 9780226458441
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jul 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake's poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe's journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley's "poetry of life," back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius's De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry's role in the perception and communication of empirical realities.
The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx's coming historical materialism.
Amanda Jo Goldstein is assistant professor of English at Cornell University.
