Writing Embodiment In Victorian Microscopy
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Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy
Author: Meegan Kennedy
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2024-12-02
Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life. Writing Embodiment reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Beautiful Mechanism draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms. Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tropes of wonder solicit affective flows from observer to wriggling animalcule and back; while skeptical, realist tropes offer to train the reader's eye, hand, body, and judgment and to formalize microscopical practice. Microscopical narratives may manipulate wonder and skepticism in productive tension or create virtual storyspaces that enlist the reader in virtual witnessing. These tropes shape every level of microscopical interest and proficiency. By analyzing their use and circulation, Writing Embodiment illuminates wider patterns of Victorian thought on embodiment, scientific practice, and community.
Victorian Paper Art and Craft
Author: Deborah Lutz
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2023-01-12
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- 1. Marginal Scribbling and Defacing -- 2. Collecting and Recollecting -- 3. Researching and Performing -- 4. Reusing, Tearing, and Folding -- 5. Crafting -- Afterword -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Lynn Matluck Brooks
language: en
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Release Date: 2025-02-25
Revealing the interplay and influence of dance and science during an age of colonial expansion Bringing together dance and science, two paradigms that explore the nature and possibilities of the body, this volume illuminates the meanings and articulations of dance in nineteenth-century societies. This global collection of studies reveals how the two fields informed each other’s development and engaged with dominant European worldviews in a time of unprecedented colonial expansion. The chapters in Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century examine how trends and developments in the performing arts reflected scientific thinking of this era, including the categorization of “types” of bodies and the ranking of cultural and religious beliefs, as well as how dance served as an active site of inquiry where the workings and limits of the human body could be studied. Researchers discuss topics including the influence of plant biology on the aesthetics of ballet, technological advancements in the staging and recording of performances, arguments for the use of Eurhythmics in promoting a stronger “race,” and European fascination with Indian dance and yoga. Featuring response essays that put leading scholars in conversation with one another and offer new perspectives, this volume is unique in its geographic scope and its discussion of diverse bodies, cultures, themes, and scientific disciplines. It sheds light on a historical interplay that has shaped many of today’s political and cultural realities. Contributors: Johanna Pitetti-Heil | Chantal Frankenbach | Jane Desmond | Christian Ducomb | Claudia Jeschke | Kélina Gotman | Pallabi Chakravorty | Andrea Harris | Dick McCaw | Stephen Ha | Emily Coates | Tiziana Leucci | Elizabeth Claire | Susan Cook | Carrie Streeter | Olivia Sabee | Janice Ross | Alexander H. Schwan | Whitney Laemmli