Five Views of Literature and Energy

Abstract

As the science of energy emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, the word energy took on new meaning. It came to represent a rather abstract, but quantifiable, scientific object, or a set of objects, including heat, light, electricity, motion, gravitational potential, chemical combustibility—each potentially convertible into the others. But older meanings lingered, and because energy always already exceeded its scientific meanings, its cultural circulation was particularly widespread and varied, and sometimes insidious because apparently so natural. Inseparable from the escalation of fossil fuel usage and the emergence of a science, an energy imaginary emerged—a way of looking at the world, a set of beliefs and values that link energy to work, growth, and progress. This chapter takes up the elusive and widely varied concepts of energy, centering on their emergence in the science and literature of the long nineteenth century. It divides the wide-ranging study of literature and energy into five categories: the social uses of energy in language, the principles of conservation and entropy, fuel and its attendant physical and cultural uses, the (mis)uses of energy concepts in the discourse of British empire, and a re-thinking of the possibilities of entropy.