Abstract
This thesis is about the relationship between a body of nineteenth-century American literature and the science of thermodynamics that was emerging between the 1820s and 1870s, changing the way people thought about the physical universe and the possibilities and limitations that it presented for human action. Its basic premise is that thermodynamic energy, as it emerged in the nineteenth century as a quantifiable phenomenon, was not a self-revealing natural fact, but the “hybrid” product of a “cultural field” that included literature among other of its essential points of mediation. Through readings of works by Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Robert Montgomery Bird and Thomas Josiah Dimsdale, it argues that literature throughout this period was very much occupied with questions and concerns that were reflected in the scientific and technological investigations that led to the creation of the laws of energy. Specifically, it argues that energy’s conservative and/or dissipative tendencies, which, besides representing objective descriptions of energetic behaviour, also reflected real possibilities and limitations for human action, were a major concern of writers at this time. Their work, it is argued, reveals humanly and historically meaningful aspects of what, in the laws of thermodynamics, would become ahistorical scientific facts, proving that literature and science, belonging to a greater “cultural field,” follow parallel lines of investigation indicative of larger cultural problematics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/38588 |
| Date | 18 December 2018 |
| Creators | Jenkins, Christopher |
| Contributors | Allen, Thomas |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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