Interlude

The book as a whole emphasizes a productive discontinuity between various eighteenth-century poets and both their Miltonic sources and their Romantic successors. Two interludes, however, qualify this picture by showing how a mortalist poetics, shared by the late Milton and some early Romantic writers, persisted in between the two in certain quarters of Enlightenment England. The first interlude focuses on the poet James Thomson. It identifies and discusses a few of the theological implications of his Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton (1727) and his revisions to The Seasons (1730).

Description

Description is generally associated with the novel in its modern form, a perception captured in one of the dictums from Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas: “Descriptions: There are always too many of them in novels.” But description has a much longer history and abounds in other genres, from the epic to lyric and didactic poetry to tragedy and beyond. In the 18th century, it was even considered a genre unto itself, in the newly conceived genre of descriptive poetry popularized by the Scottish poet James Thomson. Description also features prominently in genres of writing often considered nonliterary, such as encyclopedias, scientific writing, how-to manuals, and travel guides. Indeed, critical suspicion surrounding description in Western rhetorical and poetic tradition stems in part from the perception that it can too easily become a site for the incursion of the nonliterary (i.e., things rather than people, scientific or technical knowledge, abstruse vocabulary) into the literary domain. Description resists easy definition and has been characterized as one of the blind spots of Western literary discourse. In antiquity, rhetorical and poetic treatises gave scant attention to description, and neoclassical poetic doctrine was more concerned with policing description’s boundaries than defining it. It was not until the 18th century that description emerged as a theoretical problem worthy of debate and as a prominent literary practice. Since antiquity, description has been associated with visualization and the visual arts, through the rhetorical figures of enargeia and ekphrasis and the Renaissance doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Through this association, description has close ties to mimesis and has proved especially vulnerable to Platonic attacks on poetry, and on literature more broadly, as a mere copy of reality. In the 19th century, description featured prominently in the realist novel, but in the mid-20th century it was used, notably by the French New Novelists, as a means of contesting realism. Formalist and structuralist criticism sparked renewed interest in theorizing description in the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the 21st century, in an age of interdisciplinarity when the boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary have become increasingly porous, description has once again emerged as a key theoretical problem for thinking across disciplines and has even been proposed as a new mode of reading that avoids the pitfalls of humanist hermeneutics.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)

Being raised on the caloric theory in which heat is a conserved quantity, Thomson faced challenges in accepting Clausius’ analysis of Carnot’s heat engine. Once he finally overcame these challenges, helped by collaborating with his brother James, Thomson accepted and then furthered Clausius’ work by proposing a different perspective of Clausius’ 2nd Principle and the 2nd Law of Tthermodynamics: energy dissipation. This chapter concludes with the role Hermann von Helmholtz played in bringing a rational approach to a thermodynamic science based on cause–effect.