Chaos and Cosmos
eBook - PDF

Chaos and Cosmos

Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Chaos and Cosmos

Literary Roots of Modern Ecology in the British Nineteenth Century

About this book

In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world.

This study's interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

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Yes, you can access Chaos and Cosmos by Heidi C. M. Scott in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Modern History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. COVER Front
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Introduction: Beyond the Dichotomy
  6. PART I: Chaos
  7. Chapter 1: Romantic Chaos: Natural Patterns Disturbed
  8. Chapter 2: Victorian Chaos: Industrial Disruptions
  9. Chapter 3: Today’s Science Nonfiction
  10. PART II: Microcosm
  11. Chapter 4: Romantic Microcosms: Brain Worlds
  12. Chapter 5: Victorian Microcosms: Domestic Systems
  13. Chapter 6: Today’s Scientific Modeling
  14. PART III: Keats and Ecology: A Case Study
  15. Chapter 7: The Literary Empiricist
  16. Chapter 8: Hyperion: The Chaos of Tartarus
  17. Chapter 9: Microcosmic Odes
  18. Epilogue
  19. Works Consulted
  20. Index
  21. COVER Back