Thermopoetics ─ Energy in Victorian Literature and Science

In ThermoPoetics, Barri Gold sets out to show us how analogous,intertwined, and mutually productive poetry and physics may be. Charting the simultaneous emergenceof the laws of thermodynamics in literature and in physics that began in the 1830s, Gold finds thatnot only can science influence literature, but literature can influence science, especially in theearly 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 goodengineer. Gold's lively readings of works by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Herbert Spencer, BramStoker, Oscar Wilde, and others offer a decidedly literary introduction to such elements ofthermodynamic thought as conservation and dissipation, the linguistic tension between force andenergy, the quest for a grand unified theory, strategies for coping within an inexorably entropicuniverse, 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 theuniversal drive to entropy; Wilde's Dorian Gray and Stoker'sDracula, on the other hand, reveal the creative potential ofchaos.

Victorian literature embraced the language and ideas of energy physics toaddress 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 newphysics.

Barri J. Gold is Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College.