Ugliness and Judgment

Download Ugliness and Judgment PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691243557
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Ugliness and Judgment by : Timothy Hyde

Download or read book Ugliness and Judgment written by Timothy Hyde and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

The American Journal of Psychiatry

Download The American Journal of Psychiatry PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 840 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The American Journal of Psychiatry by :

Download or read book The American Journal of Psychiatry written by and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism

Download The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319633031
Total Pages : 892 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (196 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism by : Donald R. Wehrs

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

The Order of Forms

Download The Order of Forms PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022665348X
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Order of Forms by : Anna Kornbluh

Download or read book The Order of Forms written by Anna Kornbluh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

Reforming Trollope

Download Reforming Trollope PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317069439
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Reforming Trollope by : Deborah Denenholz Morse

Download or read book Reforming Trollope written by Deborah Denenholz Morse and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trollope the reformer and the reformation of Trollope scholarship in relation to gender, race, and genre are the intertwined subjects of eminent Trollopian Deborah Denenholz Morse’s radical rethinking of Anthony Trollope. Beginning with a history of Trollope’s critical reception, Morse traces the ways in which Trollope’s responses to the political and social upheavals of the 1860s and 1870s are reflected in his novels. She argues that as Trollope’s ideas about gender and race evolved over those two crucial decades, his politics became more liberal. The first section of the book analyzes these changes in terms of genre. As Morse shows, the novelist subverts and modernizes the quintessential English genre of the pastoral in the wake of Darwin in the early 1860s novel The Small House at Allington. Following the Second Reform Act, he reimagines the marriage plot along new class lines in the early 1870s in Lady Anna. The second section focuses upon gender. In the wake of the Second Reform Bill and the agitations for women's rights in the 1860s and 1870s, Trollope reveals the tragedy of primogeniture and male privilege in Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite and the viciousness of the marriage market in Ayala's Angel. The final section of Reforming Trollope centers upon race. Trollope's response to the Jamaica Rebellion and the ensuing Governor Eyre Controversy in England is revealed in the tragic marriage of a quintessential English gentleman to a dark beauty from the Empire's dominions. The American Civil War and its aftermath led to Trollope's insistence that English identity include the history of English complicity in the black Atlantic slave trade and American slavery, a history Trollope encodes in the creole discourses of the late novel Dr. Wortle's School. Reforming Trollope is a transformative examination of an author too long identified as the epitome of the complacent English gentleman.

Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907

Download Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317136292
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907 by : Melissa Shields Jenkins

Download or read book Fatherhood, Authority, and British Reading Culture, 1831-1907 written by Melissa Shields Jenkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a period when the idea of fatherhood was in flux and individual fathers sought to regain a cohesive collective identity, debates related to a father’s authority were negotiated and resolved through competing documents. Melissa Shields Jenkins analyzes the evolution of patriarchal authority in nineteenth-century culture, drawing from extra-literary and non-narrative source material as well as from novels. Arguing that Victorian novelists reinvent patriarchy by recourse to conduct books, biography, religious manuals, political speeches, and professional writing in the fields of history and science, Jenkins offers interdisciplinary case studies of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Hardy. Jenkins’s book contributes to our understanding of the part played by fathers in the Victorian cultural imagination, and sheds new light on the structures underlying the Victorian novel.

The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English

Download The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000872718
Total Pages : 661 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English by : Matthew Stratton

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English written by Matthew Stratton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English provides an interdisciplinary overview of the vibrant connections between literature, politics, and the political. Featuring contributions from 44 scholars across a variety of disciplines, the collection is divided into five parts: Connecting Literature and Politics; Constituting the Polis; Periods and Histories; Media, Genre, and Techne; and Spaces. Organized around familiar concepts—such as humans, animals, workers, empires, nations, and states—rather than theoretical schools, it will help readers to understand the ways in which literature affects our understanding of who is capable of political action, who has been included in and excluded from politics, and how different spaces are imagined to be political. It also offers a series of engagements with key moments in literary and political history from 1066 to the present in order to assess and reassess the utility of conventional modes of periodization. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of literary studies, which will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions within broader contexts.

Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Download Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316857956
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (168 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain by : Jonathan Farina

Download or read book Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain written by Jonathan Farina and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if' and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, such as physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category.

Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel

Download Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317002199
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel by : Jean Arnold

Download or read book Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel written by Jean Arnold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of Victorian jewels and their representation, Jean Arnold explores the role material objects play in the cultural cohesion of the West. Diamonds and other gems, Arnold argues, symbolized the most closely held beliefs of the Victorians and thus can be considered "prisms of culture." Mined in the far reaches of the empire, they traversed geographical space and cultural boundaries, representing monetary value and evoking empire, class lineage, class membership, gender relations, and aesthetics. Arnold analyzes the many roles material objects fill in Western culture and surveys the cross-cultural history of the Victorian diamond, uncovering how this object became both preeminent and representative of Victorian values. Her close readings of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, George Eliot's Middlemarch, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Great Hoggarty Diamond, and Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds show gendered, aesthetic, economic, fetishistic, colonial, legal, and culturally symbolic interpretations of jewelry as they are enacted through narrative. Taken together, these divergent interpretations offer a holistic view of a material culture's affective attachment to objects. As the assigned meanings of jewels turn them into symbols of power, personal relationships, and valued ideas, human interactions with gems elicit emotional responses that bind the materialist culture together.

Charlotte Riddell's City Novels and Victorian Business

Download Charlotte Riddell's City Novels and Victorian Business PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317168127
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Charlotte Riddell's City Novels and Victorian Business by : Silvana Colella

Download or read book Charlotte Riddell's City Novels and Victorian Business written by Silvana Colella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of the popularity she enjoyed during her lifetime, Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906) has received little attention from scholars. Silvana Colella makes a strong case for the relevance of Riddell's novels as narrative experiments that shed new light on the troubled experience of Victorian capitalism. Drawing on her impressive knowledge of commerce and finance, Riddell produced several novels that narrate the fate of individuals - manufacturers, accountants, entrepreneurs, City men and their female companions - who pursue the liberal dream of self-determination in the unstable world of London business. Colella situates novels such as Too Much Alone, George Geith, The Race for Wealth, Austin Friars and The Senior Partner in the broader cultural context, examining business manuals, commercial biographies, and essays to highlight Victorian constructions of the business ideal and the changing cultural status of the City of London. Combining historicist and formalist readings, Colella charts the progression of Riddell's imaginative commitment to the business world, focusing on the author's gendered awareness of the promises and disenchantments associated with the changing dynamics of capitalist modernisation. Her book enriches our understanding of Victorian business culture, the literary history of capitalism, and the intersections of gender, genre and economics.

My Victorian Novel

Download My Victorian Novel PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826274439
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis My Victorian Novel by : Annette R. Federico

Download or read book My Victorian Novel written by Annette R. Federico and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2020-05-08 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain. These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives. By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray Middlemarch by George Eliot Daniel Deronda by George Eliot The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens New Grub Street by George Gissing The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Dracula by Bram Stoker Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Doctoring the Novel

Download Doctoring the Novel PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821444069
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Doctoring the Novel by : Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Download or read book Doctoring the Novel written by Sylvia A. Pamboukian and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices? Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.

The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science

Download The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317042336
Total Pages : 645 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science by : John Holmes

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science written by John Holmes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction

Download Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1666938378
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (669 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction by : Noa Reich

Download or read book Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction written by Noa Reich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fiction’s engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale¬ (1866), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels’ concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels’ self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers’ expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fiction’s mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.

Living by Numbers

Download Living by Numbers PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780236948
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Living by Numbers by : Steven Connor

Download or read book Living by Numbers written by Steven Connor and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we really think about the world? We may use words to tell stories about it or draw pictures to represent it, but one thing we do far more than either of those is make calculations of the things that are in it—and to do that we use numbers. Numbers give shape and texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream, and do, a fact that Steven Connor explores in this qualitative assessment of the quantifiable. Looking at how numbers play a part in nearly every aspect of our lives, he offers a fascinating portrait of the world as a world of numbers. Connor explores a host of thought-provoking aspects of our numerical existence. He looks at the unexpected oddities that shape the loneliest number—the number one. He looks at counting as a human phenomenon and the ways we negotiate crowds, swarms, and multitudes. He demonstrates the work of calculation as it lies at the heart of poetry, jokes, painting, and music. He shows how we use numbers to adjust to uncertainty and chance and how they help us visualize the world in diagrammatic ways, and he unveils how numbers even help us think about death. Altogether, Connor brings into relief an aspect of our lives so ubiquitous that we often can’t see it, unveiling a rich new way of thinking about our existence.

Corporate Romanticism

Download Corporate Romanticism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823272257
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Corporate Romanticism by : Daniel M. Stout

Download or read book Corporate Romanticism written by Daniel M. Stout and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

Speculation

Download Speculation PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231553498
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Speculation by : Gayle Rogers

Download or read book Speculation written by Gayle Rogers and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations—from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles—often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity’s mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution’s new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create—and potentially destroy—the future.