Science always raises more questions than it can contain. These challenging essays explore how ideas are transformed as they come under the stress of unforeseen readers. Using a wealth of material from diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, Beer tracks encounters between science, literature, and other forms of emotional experience. Her analysis discloses issues of change, gender, nation, and desire. A substantial group of the essays centers on Darwin; other essays look at Hardy, Helmholtz, Hopkins, Clerk Maxwell, and Woolf. The collection throws a different light on Victorian experience and the rise of modernism and engages with current controversies about the place of science in culture.

Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter

Literature & Fiction

Beer, Gillian

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

Clarendon Press

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to delight and trouble readers of all ages today. Few consider, however, that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around him and far beyond. Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references. Gillian Beer explores Carroll’s work through the speculative gaze of Alice, for whom no authority is unquestioned and everything can speak. Parody and Punch, evolutionary debates, philosophical dialogues, educational works for children, math and logic, manners and rituals, dream theory and childhood studies—all fueled the fireworks. While much has been written about Carroll’s biography and his influence on children’s literature, Beer convincingly shows him at play in the spaces of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, drawing on then-current controversies, reading prodigiously across many fields, and writing on multiple levels to please both children and adults in different ways. With a welcome combination of learning and lightness, Beer reminds us that Carroll’s books are essentially about curiosity, its risks and pleasures. Along the way, Alice in Space shares Alice’s exceptional ability to spark curiosity in us, too.

Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Carpenter Lectures)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Chicago Press

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to delight and trouble readers of all ages today. Few consider, however, that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around him and far beyond. Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references. Gillian Beer explores Carroll’s work through the speculative gaze of Alice, for whom no authority is unquestioned and everything can speak. Parody and Punch, evolutionary debates, philosophical dialogues, educational works for children, math and logic, manners and rituals, dream theory and childhood studies—all fueled the fireworks. While much has been written about Carroll’s biography and his influence on children’s literature, Beer convincingly shows him at play in the spaces of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, drawing on then-current controversies, reading prodigiously across many fields, and writing on multiple levels to please both children and adults in different ways. With a welcome combination of learning and lightness, Beer reminds us that Carroll’s books are essentially about curiosity, its risks and pleasures. Along the way, Alice in Space shares Alice’s exceptional ability to spark curiosity in us, too.

George Eliot (Key Women Writers Series)

George Eliot (Key Women Writers Series)

History & Criticism

Indiana Univ. Pr

George Eliot (Key women writers)

Indiana University Press

Arguing With the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney

In this elegantly written collection Gillian Beer considers the difficulty of reading the past in essays on Thomas Carlyle, Philip Sidney, Samuel Richardson, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of English literature and a general readership.

Routledge& Kegan Paul

The romance (The Critical idiom, 10)

METHUEN

A history of romance from the twelfth century

The Romance (The Critical Idiom)

Eminent feminist critic Gillian Beer's work on Woolf, George Eliot, and Victorian scientific discourse are well known and admired. As the essays in this collection affirm, Beer has an extraordinary command of British cultural history, a talent for interpretative prose, and a gift for pursuing genuinely rewarding questions. In Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, Beer's essays on Woolf are brought together for the first time in a single volume.Through her close investigative textual readings, she demonstrates how Woolf's conceptualizations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing, and social and sexual relations. This is demonstrated through precise, detailed configurations, setting Woolf alongside texts both contemporary and distant, scientific and literary, with the effect that Woolf's writing is illuminated in entirely new and unexpected contexts.Beer's introduction pulls together the critical themes of her work, and renders Woolf accessible to the large audience of scholars interested in English Literature as well as women's writing."In a field that has more than its share of trendy, jargon-ridden, reductive appropriations of Woolf's texts for various easily attainable ends, Beer is a reader who honors the complexities of Woolf's texts while illuminating them; she refuses over and over again to resolve the complex into the simple, to tidy up the contradictions of a given text." --John Whittier-Ferguson, University of MichiganGillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and President, Clare Hall at University of Cambridge.

Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground : Essays

Univ of Michigan Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Beer, Gillian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Beer, Gillian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Beer, Gillian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter

Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter

Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Carpenter Lectures)

Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Carpenter Lectures)

George Eliot (Key Women Writers Series)

George Eliot (Key women writers)

Arguing With the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney

The romance (The Critical idiom, 10)

The Romance (The Critical Idiom)

Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground : Essays