The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science and the Imagination (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780230619715)

At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.

Author: E. Wilson
ISBN-10: 0230619711
ISBN-13: 9780230619715
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 11/17/2009
Pages: 278
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.80d