Book launch: The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present by Christian Gelder

About the event

Join us to celebrate the publication of The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present by Christian Gelder. Associate Professor Sigi Jöttkandt will launch the book, and refreshments will be served.

About the book

From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination—and how that imagination, in turn, responded.

Bio

Christian Gelder is a Macquarie University Research Fellow and soon to be ARC DECRA Fellow. He is the author of he The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2026). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Literature and Medicine, The Cambridge Quarterly, S: Journal for the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique, and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, he co-authored Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).