Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable

Sarah Alexander is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Vermont. Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, the novel, Victorian poetry, nineteenth-century science, Dickens, Victorian London and nineteenth-century political economy. Recent publications include 'The Residuum, Victorian Naturalism, and the Entropic Narrative', in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2013).

Introduction: Imponderable Matter 1 Dickensian Physics: Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend and the Luminiferous Ether 2 The Residuum, Victorian Naturalism and the Entropic Narrative 3 Overcoming Entropy: Energy, Capital and the Late-Victorian Literary Utopia 4 Empire and the Fourth Dimension: Non-Euclidean Geometry, the Heterotopic Narrative and the Economics of Space Epilogue: Atoms and Economics - Vortex Theory and Finance