“Amanda Jo Goldstein’s Sweet Science fuses her own generation’s ethos of reparative reading--its readiness to be summoned into strangeness by language and letters--with both a level of erudition (across disciplines, languages, and genres), and a practice of argumentation (clear, consistent, and self-accounting) that are associated with earlier practices of scholarship and of critical reading. In other words, this study is itself a work of sweet science. Just as its arguments trouble the truism that the natural sciences are always progressive (here, Lucretius joins with post-classical physics, Goethe with twenty-first-century ontogeny), so its own extraordinary conduct and achievement challenge the other half of that truism, showing that the human sciences can indeed progress.”

Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan

“Sweet Science is a singular contribution. It decisively rethinks the history and critical grasp of the life sciences as they converge in literature and science in Romanticism, and its implications for critical theory and the rise of ecosemiotics are equally compelling.”

Theresa M. Kelley, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“Goldstein’s Sweet Science has been anticipated with a keenness unusual for a first book. It does not disappoint. More than a valuable rereading of Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Percy Shelley, this book offers a new chapter in the recent recovery of Lucretianism as a powerful shaping force in European literature and thought. It challenges longstanding assumptions about nature and culture, materialism and figuration, some that derive from the Romantic period itself. In the neo-Lucretian alternative excavated by Goldstein, the work of poetry is not inimical to, or even quite distinct from, the work of empirical science. Instead, empiricism and poetics emerge as interanimating one another, fully cooperative in the work of making a world. It is a bold thesis, deftly argued, with implications spelled out for the young Marx and, indeed, for ourselves.”

James Chandler, University of Chicago

“Richly suggestive, the book discovers poetry in the Romantic life sciences, and a science of life in Romantic poetry. Goldstein frequently enacts this chiasmus in her own writing, which is not only elegant but also rich in metaphors that render philosophy and theory material and palpable.”

Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

“The brilliance of Goldstein’s analysis. . . will certainly spur new investigations in the interrelated areas of Romantic science and Romantic poetry. But perhaps even more importantly, her work transforms conventional thinking about historical materialism and the Darwinian progression that often underwrites it by exploding their linearity and individual insularity that ensue from the monopoly of current scientific and philosophical models.”

 

European Romantic Review

“[Sweet Science] convincingly argue[s] that poets, novelists, and scientists of the long nineteenth century played key roles in generating theories of vital materialism, ecological relation, and material signification that have grown in prominence within the humanities and social sciences over the last several decades.”

Review 19

“This is a timely, innovative, and fascinating study of the neo-Lucretian tradition in Romantic-period literature, which concentrates on Blake, Goethe, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

Eighteenth-Century Studies