Title: Victorian literature and the physics of the imponderable /
Authors: Alexander, Sarah
Year: 2015
Subjects: English literature History and criticism; Physics in literature; Medicine in Literature; English literature; Physics in literature
Abstract: The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or 'imponderable'. Writers such as Charles Dickens, William Morris and Joseph Conrad used recent concepts such as energy, entropy and atom theory to explore key issues of capitalism, imperialism and social unrest. In doing so, they created a fresh vocabulary, helping to make sense of the new experiences of modernity." -- Publisher's description
Contents: Introduction: imponderable matter -- Dickensian physics: Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and the luminiferous ether -- The residuum, Victorian naturalism and the entropic narrative -- Overcoming entropy: energy, capital and the late-Victorian literary utopia -- Empire and the fourth dimension: non-Euclidean geometry, the heterotopic narrative and the economics of space -- Epilogue: atoms and economics--vortex theory and finance.