H I STO RY & P H I LO S O P H Y O F S C I E N C E
Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland By Diarmid A. Finnegan Series: Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Winner of the Frank Watson Prize in Scottish History, 2011 The relationship between science and civil society is essential to our understanding of cultural change during the Victorian era. Science was frequently packaged as an appropriate form of civic culture, inculcating virtues necessary for civic progress. In turn, civic culture was presented as an appropriate context for enabling and supporting scientific progress. Finnegan's study looks at the shifting nature of this process during the nineteenth century, using Scotland as the focus for his argument.
University of Pittsburgh Press • 9780822966357 • New in Paperback 229 x 152mm • 248 pages • December 2020 • £26.50
Science and Eccentricity Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences By Victoria Carroll Series: Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century
The first scholarly history of eccentricity. The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This book explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organised social and economic order. It focuses on the self-taught natural philosopher William Martin, the fossilist Thomas Hawkins and the taxidermist Charles Waterton.
University of Pittsburgh Press • 9780822966333 • New in Paperback 229 x 152mm • 272 pages • December 2020 • £26.50
Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences Shared Assumptions, 1820–1858 By James Elwick Series: Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Explores how "compound individuality" brought together life scientists pre-Darwinian London. Scientists conducting research in comparative anatomy, physiology, cellular microscopy, embryology and the neurosciences repeatedly stated that plants and animals were compounds of smaller independent units. Discussion of a "bodily economy" was widespread. But by 1860, the most flamboyant discussions of compound individuality had come to an end in Britain. Elwick relates the growth and decline of questions about compound individuality to wider nineteenth-century debates about research standards. University of Pittsburgh Press • 9780822966340 • New in Paperback 229 x 152mm248 pages • December 2020 • £26.50
Join the conversation!
@oxbowbooks
/oxbowbooks
109
