From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture - Softcover

Haynes, Roslynn D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1421423049 ISBN 13: 9781421423043

Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

"Her approach is to correlate developments in science and technology over the following seven centuries with descriptions of how scientists have been portrayed in contemporaneous literature, and more recently in fascinating read."

(Times Higher Education)

"This is a wonderful book, both in the sense of being a pleasure to read and being full of wonders."

(SAGE Blog)

"In this update, Haynes has extended her purview to accommodate the growth in scholarship on science and popular culture, especially in the area of film, which has occurred in the twenty years since the publication of the first edition... Anyone wishing to design a course on science or the scientist (however he or she may define these terms) in literature, cinema or popular culture, set either in a single era or over a span of time, could easily get away with using this new volume as a one-stop shopping catalogue for primary sources."

(Neeraja Sankaran, Independent Scholar British Society for Literature and Science)

Reseña del editor:

They were mad, of course. Or evil. Or godless, amoral, arrogant, impersonal, and inhuman. At best, they were well intentioned but blind to the dangers of forces they barely controlled. They were Faust and Frankenstein, Jekyll and Moreau, Caligari and Strangelove―the scientists of film and fiction, cultural archetypes that reflected ancient fears of tampering with the unknown or unleashing the little-understood powers of nature.

In From Madman to Crime Fighter, Roslynn D. Haynes analyzes stereotypical characters―including the mad scientist, the cold-blooded pursuer of knowledge, the intrepid pathbreaker, and the bumbling fool―that, from medieval times to the present day, have been used to depict the scientist in Western literature and film. She also describes more realistically drawn scientists, characters who are conscious of their public responsibility to expose dangers from pollution and climate change yet fearful of being accused of lacking evidence.

Drawing on examples from Britain, America, Germany, France, Russia, and elsewhere, Haynes explores the persistent folklore of mad doctors of science and its relation to popular fears of a depersonalized, male-dominated, and socially irresponsible pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. She concludes that today’s public response to science and scientists―much of it negative―is best understood by recognizing the importance of such cultural archetypes and their significance as myth. From Madman to Crime Fighter is the most comprehensive study of the image of the scientist in Western literature and film.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1421423049
• ISBN 13: 9781421423043
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 424