| Author |
Gold, Barri J. |
| Year |
2010 |
| Publisher |
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press |
| Number of pages |
343 |
| ISBN |
9780262013727 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
In ThermoPoetics, Barri Gold sets out to show us how analogous, intertwined, and mutually
productive poetry and physics may be. Charting the simultaneous emergence of the laws
of thermodynamics in literature and in physics that began in the 1830s, Gold finds
that not only can science influence literature, but literature can influence science,
especially in the early stages of intellectual development. Nineteenth-century physics
was often conducted in words. And, Gold claims, a poet could be a genius in thermodynamics
and a novelist could be a damn good engineer. Gold's lively readings of works by Alfred
Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Herbert Spencer, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and others offer
a decidedly literary introduction to such elements of thermodynamic thought as conservation
and dissipation, the linguistic tension between force and energy, the quest for a
grand unified theory, strategies for coping within an inexorably entropic universe,
and the demonic potential of the thermodynamically savvy individual. Gold shows us
that in A Tale of Two Cities, for example, Dickens produces order in spite of the
universal drive to entropy; Wilde's Dorian Gray and Stoker's Dracula, on the other
hand, reveal the creative potential of chaos. Victorian literature embraced the language
and ideas of energy physics to address the era's concerns about religion, evolution,
race, class, empire, gender, and sexuality. Gold argues that these concerns, in turn,
shaped the hopes and fears expressed about the new physics.
