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Mendeleev to Oganesson: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on the Periodic Table
Ambix ( IF 0.3 ) Pub Date : 2019-05-21 , DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2019.1610598 Karoliina Pulkkinen 1
Ambix ( IF 0.3 ) Pub Date : 2019-05-21 , DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2019.1610598 Karoliina Pulkkinen 1
Affiliation
and in English Gothic romances by Ann Bradstreet, William Goodwin, Sir Walter Scott, and Henry Hart Milman. In Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Ziolkowski suggests, Victor Frankenstein’s bid to rid mankind of disease can be read as an alchemical quest of sorts, with the science of electricity replacing the philosophers’ stone. The mid-nineteenth century saw a significant increase of alchemists in literature, including Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and works by Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, and Friedrich Halm. In America, Nathaniel Hawthorne used alchemical tropes and introduced alchemists in many of his novels, and Edgar Allan Poe’s fascination with the occult comes through in many of his stories in the form of alchemical symbols and tropes. European poets, too, showed an interest in alchemy, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Christina Rossetti. During the fin de siècle period, alchemy became associated with theosophy, Kabbalah, magic, and spiritualism. Both Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft featured alchemists in their works, and the alchemical imagery inWilliam Butler Yeats’s poems speak to his obsession with magic and the occult. The inter-war years saw the publication of André Breton’s SecondManifesto of Surrealism (1930), which discussed the relationship between Surrealists and alchemists. Alchemists and alchemical symbols of truth and wisdom abound in the poetry of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and Robert Hillyer, as well as in novels by Werner Bergengruen, Friedrich Alfred Schmid Noerr, and Franz Spunda. Interestingly, Paracelsus appeared in a number of works by pro-National Socialists, such as Erika Spann-Rheinsch, who attributed to Paracelsus the saying “Work brings us salvation,” (p. 180). Ziolkowski analyses in some detail the work of Carl G. Jung, for example his 1932 essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, which he likens to “eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another, where amid acids, poisonous fumes, and fire and ice, the homunculus of a new, universal consciousness is distilled” (p. 154). Ziolkowski’s post-1945 era actually begins in the 1960s, where anti-science and the anti-war movement ushered in the “new age” of alchemy, occultism, and mysticism. According to Ziolkowski, it is within this counter-culture challenging scientific and technical progress that we can best understand the renewed interest in alchemy, reflected by a proliferation of novels featuring alchemists, for example by Paolo Coelho, Evan S. Connell, Robertson Davies, Hilary Mantel, Umberto Eco, Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Doody, among others. As Ziolkowski puts it, “literary views of the alchemist vary in a direct inverse proportion to cultural – and not only scientific! – attitudes toward alchemy” (p. 229). This volume offers in-depth coverage and analysis of the role of alchemists in literature that will provide a framework for further research for historians of science.
更新日期：2019-05-21
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