... or charlatan manipulating a narrative full of spectacular coincidences and implausibilities. Historians of science, however, have shown that performances with spectacular machines played a key role in establishing the epistemological authority of empirical science in the eighteenth century. Like Fielding...

...Robert Mitchell [email protected] S. Pearl Brilmyer , The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism ( Chicago : U of Chicago P , 2022 ), pp. 296 , cloth, $105.00 , paper, $30.00 . Copyright © 2024 by Novel, Inc. 2024 The Science...

...Andrew Gaedtke Recent developments in cognitive science have overturned the restrictions of behaviorism and have once again made consciousness a legitimate object of scientific investigation. New brain scanning technologies have introduced the possibility of mapping the neural correlates...

... dramatizes a citizen-science response to marine debris and theorizes marine science as a mode of witnessing and a mode of reading. Furthermore, by bringing her depictions of marine science into conversation with the Zen Buddhist practice of not-knowing, Ozeki meditates upon the idea that attempts to know...

... novel form around the attractions and reactions that organized social and psychological life in his city. Victorian sciences—particularly the work of George Henry Lewes and Charles Darwin—were turning to “net-work” to describe the plastic processes underpinning biological life. Dickens's fiction used...

... between literature and science, their fates bearing the mark of Middlemarch 's concern to maintain the specificity of the novelistic even in its proximity to the sociological. With this in mind, we will see how the realist novel's project of self-differentiation—its claims to offer forms of insight...

... and coercive force they see their views carrying. McEwan's work finds the forms of this immodesty not just in religious or political ideals but in science, criticism, and secularism, the latter perhaps the more concerning because they conceal their immodesty in the allegedly modest forms of “neutrality...

...—Joyce's Ulysses , Pound's Cantos , Freud's Schreber case—at a moment when biological life was being reimagined through the optic of eugenic science and comparative anatomy. The essay extends Lee Edelman's critique of reproductive futurity in No Future to suggest that dystopic biological futures were being...

... to the rising science of architectural acoustics and to the social imperative to control sound in urban spaces. It argues that Woolf responds to the psychological and social exigencies of modern sound by integrating textual and architectural listening modes in an acoustic hermeneutic : a listening practice...

... of the cognitive standards of liberal citizenship, statistical sciences around the time of the 1867 Reform Act reversed the usual priority given to the individual over the collective, redefining the self as a compilation of demographic and social information. When Anthony Trollope's 1867 Phineas Finn performs...

...Ursula K. Heise This essay examines the convergence of the science-fiction motif of terraforming with current discussions of the Anthropocene. In the process, it outlines a vision of the city, not as the antithesis to nature or a biological wasteland but as itself a form of nature. This vision...

... thematic concerns and formal structures, especially its concern with point of view and language, make this novel a global fiction of sorts. The novel's often criticized science fiction elements in particular can be elucidated, I argue, by Ulrich Beck's utopian observation that “it is the future...

...”—the science of the excerpt is to find the right passage of text to produce a series of affects identical in nature, if abbreviated in time, to the series of affects the novel under consideration produces. Unlike the censorious critics interested only in the moral effects of fiction or the lazy critics...

... toward using mechanical philosophy in science, the disciplining of the body in order to maximize production and reproduction, and the increasing popularity of novel reading. Sterne's novel features stopped clocks, broken machines, and stories that, despite titillating beginnings, fail to satisfy...

... Parker's incessant interruptions of domestic life that is “too domestic to admit of calculation” have to say about the paper currency crises that dominated most of Austen's writing career? Challenging the nineteenth-century commonplace that “Miss Martineau understands the science” and Austen “plays by ear...

.... The present examination of John Henry Days attempts to bridge such valuable conversations about form and description. This article argues that as John Henry Days grapples with describing forms that constantly remake themselves, it takes a position akin to science and technology studies scholar Michael Lynch's...

... specialized language, closed social spaces, and charismatic leadership—has its origins in antitotalitarian political science, fiction, sociology, and psychology. Mitchell and Haruki Murakami (discussed briefly) both question how this Cold War legacy has shaped our understandings of individual agency, and both...

... with recent institutionalist scholarship from the social sciences and makes Nostromo a significant text in the history of the modern novel's engagement with collectivity. Works Cited Acemoglu Daron , Johnson Simon , and Robinson James . “ The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade...

...Ian Afflerbach Abstract Cixin Liu's science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past has sold more than 8 million copies and earned him the first Hugo Award to an Asian writer; it represents Chinese SF's breakout success in the anglophone fiction market. While his novels have received...

... of apocalyptic social breakdown precipitated by extreme weather, sea-level rise, and hellfire temperatures. Science fiction has been fascinated by apocalyptic scenarios for many decades, with nuclear Armageddon and epidemic disease among the favored tropes of mass destruction. But the new ‘‘cli has an uneasy...