Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science (edición 2010)por Richard Holmes (Autor)
Información de la obraLa edad de los prodigios : terror y belleza en la ciencia del Romanticismo por Richard Holmes
Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. terror y belleza en la ciencia sel romanticismo. indaga en aqullos genios sabios, exploradores y científicos de finales del XVIII. ( )
In his radiant new book, "The Age of Wonder," Holmes treats us to the amazing lives of the pioneering sailors and balloonists, astronomers and chemists of the Romantic era. Making good on the book's subtitle, he takes us on a dazzling tour of their chaotic British observatories and fatal explorations in African jungles, showing us "how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science." In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page. Richard Holmes, the pre-eminent biographer of the Romantic generation and the author of intensely intimate lives of Shelley and Coleridge, now turns his attention to what Coleridge called the “second scientific revolution,” when British scientists circa 1800 made electrifying discoveries to rival those of Newton and Galileo. In Holmes’s view, “wonder”-driven figures like the astronomer William Herschel, the chemist Humphry Davy and the explorer Joseph Banks brought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work” and “produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science.” Richard Holmes aims to debunk the popular image ("myth" is his word) that the Romantic era was inherently "anti-scientific." Indeed, he argues, it was an era in which science was remarkably transformed by the spirit of the age. . . . [He] endeavors to dramatize how the "Romantic Generation" -- bracketed by Capt. James Cook's first voyage around the world in 1768 and Darwin's embarkation for the Galapagos Islands in 1831 -- achieved what amounted to a "second scientific revolution" (Coleridge's term), forever altering the course of scientific investigation. . . . Mr. Holmes perhaps overstates the discontinuity between "Romantic science" and what came before and after, but he is right to stress the novel tone that insinuated itself into the project of science at the end of the 18th century. And he is right to seize the expeditions of discovery as chronological markers. It was a moment in which bold explorations -- cosmological as well as geographical -- changed our understanding of the world. A writer's skill can make a lost world live, and Richard Holmes does that here. Like Davy's gas, The Age of Wonder gives us a whole set of "newly connected and newly modified ideas", a new model for scientific exploration and poetic expression in the Romantic period. Informative and invigorating, generous and beguiling, it is, indeed, wonderful. PremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
"Crónica torrencial y apasionada de una época en que los poetas miraban a las estrellas y los científicos soñaban con cambiar el mundo. Una época de descubrimientos asombrosos, viajes iniciáticos a países remotos, literatura de monstruos y cielos cargados de promesas." No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)509.4109033Natural sciences and mathematics General Science History, geographic treatment, biography Europe British Isles -- Ireland and ScotlandClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |