Constance Naden : Scientist, Philosopher, Poet Hardback

by Clare Stainthorp

Part of the Writing and Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century series

Hardback

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Description

Constance Naden (1858â€“1889) is a unique voice in Victorian literature and science.

This book, the first full-length critical account of her life and works, brings into focus the reciprocal nature of Nadenâ€™s poetry, philosophical essays and scientific studies.

The development of Nadenâ€™s thinking is explored in detail, with newly discovered unpublished poems and notes from her adolescence shedding important light upon this progression. Close readings of Nadenâ€™s wide-ranging corpus of poetry and prose trace her commitment to an interdisciplinary world-scheme that sought unity in diversity.

This book demonstrates how a rigorous scientific education, a thorough engagement with poetry and philosophy of the long nineteenth century, an involvement with the Victorian radical atheist movement, and a comic sensibility each shaped Nadenâ€™s intellectual achievements.

Naden sought to show how the light of reason is made even brighter by the spark of poetic creation and how the imagination is as much a tool of the scientist and the philosopher as the artist. Taking a comprehensive approach to this complex and overlooked figure of the Victorian period, Stainthorp demonstrates how Nadenâ€™s texts provide a new and important vantage point from which to consider synthetic thinking as a productive and creative force within nineteenth-century intellectual culture. This book was the winner of the 2017 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Nineteenth-Century Studies.