Eric G. Wilson. The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination.(Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History)(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University

Eric G. Wilson. The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003. Pp. viii+278. $45.00.

Noah Heringman, ed. Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+281. $86.50 cloth/$29.95 paper.

These two books on literary responses to scientific advance will broaden the horizons of teachers and students of literature. In The Spiritual History of Ice, Eric Wilson achieves his aim of interpreting Frankenstein, "Mont Blanc," Manfred, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and pertinent works by Emerson and Thoreau in the light of discoveries within newly "esoteric" natural philosophy. Studies of light and refraction had led to discoveries that crystals, glaciers, and the icebergs defending the north and south poles were not changeless, as "exoteric" empiricists had thought, but even more alive and mutant than legends from a religious, occult, and Faustian past had believed. Although historians of science might find inadequate the citation and quotations of major beacons in crystallography, glaciology, and exploration from their own reliable surveys rather than directly from the beacons, Wilson's book is a learned and wide-ranging literary study certain to be influential in both content and method.

Whether considering frozen shapes as crystals, glaciers, or icebergs, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in Wilson's demonstration, converted a negative view of ice as static waste into positive awe at the activity and growth of molecular crystals equally with their formation into the frozen, ship-shattering, color-obliterating antipodes. Among imaginative writers in English, in the era of Goethe, Novalis, Swedenborg, James Hutton, and Humphry Davy, Thoreau and Emerson best illustrate, more...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.