Scholnick, Robert

Dr. Robert Scholnick received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He is Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William & Mary.

Poe's Eureka, Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770--1850

2018 1-4955-0695-9
Dr. Scholnick argues that Poe recognized that 'science" was not a unitary endeavor. Like Shelley, who was influenced by Erasmus Darwin and Hawthorne among others, Poe understood that science was inherently political, and he wrote critically of the famous Bridgewater Treatises, which were commissioned in Britain in the 1830s to demonstrate God's continuing providence. The radical tradition enabled Poe to separate himself from the dominant assumptions of natural theology of his time about such matters as Special Creation and the Fixity of Species.