{"product_id":"9780226458588","title":"Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life","description":"Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In \u003ci\u003eSweet Science\u003c\/i\u003e, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals \u003ci\u003eOn Morphology\u003c\/i\u003e, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s \u003ci\u003eDe rerum natura\u003c\/i\u003e to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon \u003ci\u003eDe rerum natura\u003c\/i\u003e for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, \u003ci\u003eSweet Science\u003c\/i\u003e opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.","brand":"University of Chicago Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47073354383600,"sku":"9780226458588","price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780226458588_p0.jpg?v=1763674324","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780226458588","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}