The art of discovery
Subtitle: encounters in literature and science
By: edited by Marareth Hagen, Randi Koppen and Margery Vibe Skagen
Publisher: Aarhus University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Århus, Denmark
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9788779345010
Subjects: Literature and science; History and criticism; Modern Literature
Description: Robots, human hybrids and fictional monsters assembled from graveyard body parts by mad scientists have haunted literature for centuries. The frightening but alluring motif highlights a long and complex love affair between literature and science; an affair filled with fascination, commonalities, differences and antagonism. Over the past decades, however, the two cultures have found common ground and interests, giving a momentum to consider the complex intersections in their historical contexts.

The Art of Discovery has evolved from this vantage point. Bringing together scholars of literature, natural sciences, and philosophy of science, the anthology spans the 19th and 20th centuries and discusses a range of different encounters. These include Goethe's theory of colour, Darwin's 'filthy heraldries', Sigrid Undset's usage of biology, and literary responses to the first man on the moon, Baudelaire's infatuation with magnetism, the robot as a theme in literature, and literature's moral imperative post Hiroshima.

The anthology, by internationally renowned scholars, brings new perspectives to the existential, ethical, intellectual and metaphysical implications of the age-long love-hate relationship between the 'two cultures'. --Book Jacket.
Table of contents: title: Mapping, bridging, quilting : tracing the relations between literature and science; title: The love-hate relationship of literature and science / Andrea Battistini; title: Darwin's "filthy heraldries" / Gillan Beer; title: Scandal and oblivion : some thoughts on Darwin, Oedipus and adaptation / Holly Henry; title: Goethe's theory of colour : premodern or postmodern? / Ragnar Fjelland; title: Baudelaire and the poetics of magnetism / Margery Vibe Skagen; title: From heredity of acquired traints to atavism : the impact of Darwin on Scandinavian literature / Eivind Tjønneland; title: The maternal body in Sigrid Undset's writings : between scientific object and social construction / Christine Hamm; title: Modernism's Einstein : Wyndham Lewis and the politics of science popularisation / Randi Koppen; title: The riddle of the robots / Jon Bing; title: Leo Szilard : immoral science; title: moral fiction? / Roger Strand; title: The big bang of the neobaroque : fragments of relation or of unity? / Hans Jacob Ohldieck; title: The rigors of sun, the clemency of the shadow : from Eakins to Buffon; title: with love? / Željka Švrljuga; title: Ecopoetry's quandry / Charles I. Armstrong; title: Metaphor and cognition in science, poetry and theology / Jostein Børtnes; title: The art of selection? : lessons for research policy in Hedda Gabler / Rasmus T. Slaattelid.