Poetics of Science: Romantic Literature

3 Credits.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a famous parable about the limits of scientific endeavor, but it grew out of a culture where the line between science and literature was not at all secure, and writers often considered themselves in collaboration with the newest scientific disciplines. This course will follow that collaboration and debates that emerged in British Romanticism as the disciplines of geology, meteorology, anatomy, demography, evolutionary biology and Literature itself began to take their modern shape.