Before Einstein : the Fourth Dimension in Fin-de-Siècle Literature and Culture.

Before Albert Einstein proposed the concept of four-dimensional spacetime, late Victorian scientists, radical philosophers and writers were discussing the possibility of a different kind of fourth dimension. 'Before Einstein' offers the first book-length examination of the impact of pre-Re...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Throesch, Elizabeth L.
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: London : Anthem Press, 2017.
Series:Anthem nineteenth century studies.
Subjects:
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Table of Contents:
  • Half Title; Series Information; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907); Before Einstein: The Literary Fourth Dimension; 'Ambulatory Relations'; Part I: Reading the Fourth Dimension; Part II: Reading Through the Fourth Dimension; The Literary Fourth Dimension; Part I Reading the Fourth Dimension; Chapter One Imagining 'Something Perfectly New': Problems of Language, Conception and Perception; The New Geometries; The Dimensional Analogy; Before Hinton: The Fourth Dimension 1846-1880; Hinton's Early Influences.
  • The Ruskinian ImaginationHinton's Hyperspace Philosophy; Chapter Two Constructing the Fourth Dimension: The First Series of the Scientific Romances; 'What Is the Fourth Dimension?'; Victorian Thermodynamics and the Fourth Dimension; 'The Persian King; or, the Law of the Valley'; 'Casting Out the Self'; Chapter Three The Four-Dimensional Self: Personal, Political and Untimely; The Hintonians; Gendered Temporality; Stella as Experiment; Untimely and Invisible; Nietzsche, the 'Disadvantages' of the Past and An Unfinished Communication; 'Unlearning'; Eternal Recurrence in Nietzsche and Hinton.
  • Part II Reading Through the Fourth DimensionChapter Four Four-Dimensional Consciousness: The Correspondence Between William James and Charles Howard Hinton; The Hinton-James Correspondence; The Fourth Dimension as Conjunctive Relations; 'A Moving Consciousness' in William James and Hinton; William James and the Heroic Will-to-Attention; Hinton, James and Fechner's 'Mother-Sea' of Consciousness; Chapter Five H.G. Wells's Four-Dimensional Literary Aesthetic; Four-Dimensional Invention; The Other Invisible Protagonist; 'An "Habeas Corpus" of an Uncanny Source'
  • Wells's Splintering Frame Technique and 'Cubist Visual Culture'Disruption and Disunity in The Invisible Man; The Spoils of Boon; Chapter Six Exceeding 'The Trap of the Reflexive': Henry James's Dimensions of Consciousness; The Spiralling Consciousness in Henry James; The Spoils of Poynton (1896-1897); 'The Great Good Place' (1900); Henry James and 'Aesthetic Time'; 'The Jolly Corner' (1908); 'A Kind of Fourth Dimension' in Henry James; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.