Strange science
Subtitle: investigating the limits of knowledge in the Victorian Age
By: Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, editors
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 293
ISBN-13: 9780472130177
Subjects: Science; Parapsychology; History
Description: The essays examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society. To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. "Strange Science" takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world.
Notes: "With a foreword by Dame Gillian Beer"--Cover.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Foreword / Dame Gillian Beer; title: Acknowledgments; title: Introduction / Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett; title: Part I. Strange plants : new frontiers in the natural world. 1. Victorian orchids and the forms of ecological society / Lynn Voskuil ; 2. Discriminating the "minuter beauties of nature" : botany as natural theology in a Victorian medical school / Meegan Kennedy ; 3. "A perfect world of wonders" : Marianne North and the pleasures and pursuits of botany / Narin Hassan ; 4. Killer plants of the late nineteenth century / Elizabeth Chang; title: Part II. Strange bodies : rethinking physiology. 5. Reading through deafness : Francis Galton and the strange science of psychophysics / Danielle Coriale ; 6. Performing phonographic physiology / James Emmott ; 7. "So extraordinary a bond" : mesmerism and sympathetic identification in Charles Adams's Notting Hill mystery / Lara Karpenko ; 8. Immoral science in The picture of Dorian Gray / Suzanne Raitt; title: Part III. Strange energies : reconceptualizing the physical universe. 9. Chaotic fictions : nonlinear effects in Victorian science and literature / Barri J. Gold ; 10. The Victorian occult atom : Annie Besant and clairvoyant atomic research / Sumangala Bhattacharya ; 11. Inductive science, literary theory, and the occult in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "suggestive" system / Anna Maria Jones ; 12. Psychical research and the fantastic science of spirits / L. Anne Delgado ; 13. The energy of belief : The unseen universe and the spirit of thermodynamics / Tamara Ketabgian; title: Contributors; title: Index.