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Richard Menke, barri j. gold. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science., The Review of English Studies, Volume 62, Issue 257, November 2011, Pages 829–831, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgr065
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At some point between Blake's ‘energy is eternal delight’ and Einstein's ‘E = mc2’, ‘energy took on a new meaning’ (p. 4), notes Barri J. Gold. Her energetic book traces that meaning, analysing the work that energy could do in scientific writing and literature from Sadi Carnot's Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (1824) to the turn of the twentieth century. As Gold demonstrates, even as nineteenth-century physicists were creating and contesting scientific definitions for terms such as energy, work, power, heat, and force, Victorian poets and novelists were producing narratives that shared the emergent thermodynamic concerns for conservation and entropy, the ‘laws’ of energy formulated by Rudolf Clausius at mid-century. That is, both scientific and literary writing became deeply involved in what Gold calls ‘thermopoetics, broadly speaking, … the word work that went into the making of the facts of energy physics’ (p. 153). Indeed, in her readings, literature often anticipates scientific developments, helping advance ideas that might later become scientific formulas and facts.
