Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Economy: Quality of Pleasure, Inter-Subjectivity, and Community

Throughout the long nineteenth century, scientific progress and technical advancement called for new linguistic means to convey the profound transformations witnessed by Romantic and Victorian Britain. Lexical innovation, novel rhetorical strategies, new genres and discourses testify to an impulse to describe and popularise new scientific practices, as well as the worldviews ensuing from this revolution. Inherently fertile and receptive, language incorporated and reflected this epistemic change in specialized writing, in the popular press, in fiction and in poetry. The Language of Science in the Long Nineteenth Century foregrounds the role of language in representing, aestheticizing, and scrutinising science across disciplines, discourses, and text typologies. The volume provides a composite picture of the manifold encounters between language and science in the nineteenth century, documenting a cross-fertilising dialogue that led to new social and cultural perspective and a novel, collective British identity.