Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy

FAIN: FT-229725-15

Meegan Kennedy Hanson
Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL 32306-0001)

Summer research and writing on British Literature, History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine.

In Summer 2015 I plan to revise two of six chapters of my book manuscript, which explores Victorians' romance with the microscope: how writers use the language of wonder and the sublime to describe the eye and its technological analogue, the microscope. This visionary discourse, common in natural theology and natural history, also marks professional medical and scientific treatises, even as they warn that vision is inherently flawed. Victorians redirect the language of wonder from religious to secular use, celebrating the microscope's role in science and medicine, education, empire, even mass media; they also condemn it as unreliable, addictive, and sensational. The microscope uniquely concentrates a sublime promise of extraordinary access to other worlds and a harsh reminder of the irreducible individuality and boundedness of the observer's vision. If "a man's reach should exceed his grasp," the microscope provides a site from which Victorians try the limits of the subject.

Associated Products

Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Book)
Title: Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism
Author: Kennedy, Meegan
Abstract: Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life. Writing Embodiment reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Beautiful Mechanism draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms. Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tr
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/writing-embodiment-in-victorian-microscopy-9780198939009?q=kennedy%20meegan&lang=en&cc=gb#
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website.
Access Model: n/a
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198939009
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---