Mediating Order and Chaos : : The Water-Cycle in the Complex Adaptive Systems of Romantic Culture / / Rodney Farnsworth.

• Superior document: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 56
• VerfasserIn: Farnsworth, Rodney
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden; , Boston : : BRILL,, 2001.
• Year of Publication: 2001
• Language: English
• Series: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 56.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (355 pages)

This literature-centered study offers an interdisciplinary approach to Romantic culture. If is pioneering in that it employs the complexity method of anthropology. Recent literary studies employ the complexity/chaos theory adapted from the natural sciences; however, here is presented for the first time a complexity method taken from the social/human sciences. This complexity method is useful in mediating not only contradictions within Romanticism, but the chaos of contemporary theories concerning it. One of the intensifying literary debates is that between the so-called "Greens" and "Reds," naturalists and humanists. Mediating Order and Chaos not only traces the split between nature and man to Romantic Culture but finds there, too, a Spinozian vision of man and nature in unity - thereby denying any naturalist/humanist split. This volume is of interest for those who wish to see essays in the holistic approach to culture. Centering on hydraulics, hydrology, and meteorology, this study examines literature, painting, music, economics, and the rhetoric of science, philosophy, and politics, it therewith demonstrates how the water cycle was transformed into a cosmic metaphor that mediated, in the form of several complex adaptive systems, between the chaos of too much change and that of not enough.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Method, Model and Sub-models -- The Method: Complexity Theory Applied -- The Science Sub-Model from Hydrology and Meteorology -- The Humanities Sub-Model from Literature, Painting, and Music -- The Political Sub-Model: from Revolutions and Counterrevolutions -- Source: -- Fountains -- Springs -- How they fit into the water-cycle -- Flow: Brooks -- Rivers -- Waterfalls -- How they fit into the water-cyle -- Receptacle -- Lake -- Sea -- Ocean -- How they fit into the water-cycle -- Link -- Clouds and the processes of evaporation and condensation - rain and snow -- How they complete the cosmic vision of the water-cycle -- Conclusions: the three complex adaptive systems of the Romantics.