Scientific Americans
eBook - PDF

Scientific Americans

The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Scientific Americans

The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

About this book

Demonstrating the timely relevance of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jack London and Henry Adams, this book shows how debates about evolution, identity, and a shifting world picture have uncanny parallels with the emerging global systems that shape our own lives. Tracing these systems' take-off point in the early twentieth century through the lens of popular science journalism, John Bruni makes a valuable contribution to the study of how biopolitical control over life created boundaries among races, classes, genders and species. Rather than accept that these writers get their scientific ideas about evolution second-hand, filtered through a social Darwinist ideology, this study argues that they actively determine what evolution means. Furthermore, the book, examines the ecological concerns that naturalist narratives reflect - such as land and water use, waste management, and environmental pollution - previously unaddressed in a book-length study.

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Yes, you can access Scientific Americans by John Bruni in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Science General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. ToC
  2. Cover
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. List of illustrations
  5. Introduction
  6. 1 Popular Science, Evolution and Global Information Management
  7. I. Reconstructing the social and scientific
  8. II. Scientific and cultural narratives of expansion
  9. III. Information and control systems
  10. IV. Historicizing science
  11. 2 Dirty Naturalism and the Regime of Thermodynamic Self-Organization
  12. I. Social regulation and the power of art
  13. II. Self-organization and energy flows
  14. III. Ecocriticism and thermodynamics
  15. IV. Social work and moral parasites
  16. 3 The Ecology of Empire
  17. I. The Call of the Wild and the national frontier
  18. II. Wild Fang and the ideology of domestication
  19. III. The multiplicity of animal bodies
  20. IV. Ghosts of American citizens
  21. V. Where to draw the line? Biological kinshipand legal discourse
  22. 4 After the Flood: Performance and Nation
  23. I. Managing life
  24. II. Business morality and Western water policy
  25. III. ‘Constitutional restlessness’ and ‘something not ourselves’
  26. IV. Systems of art: perception and communication
  27. V. Pure fiction
  28. 5 The Miseducation of Henry Adams: Fantasies of Race,Citizenship and Biological Dynamos
  29. I. Evolution as historical process
  30. II. Thermodynamics and citizenship
  31. III. The new American as techno-subject
  32. IV. Beyond evolution: information, control and paranoia
  33. V. ‘The Rule of Phase Applied to History’
  34. VI. ‘A Letter to American Teachers of History’
  35. Conclusion
  36. I. Henry Adams: ecocritic?
  37. II. ‘Cyborg politics’ and the technoscientific regime
  38. III. The American System and global debt
  39. IV. Biopolitics and posthuman life: the call of Jack London
  40. Epilogue
  41. Notes
  42. Bibliography
  43. Index