Sean Silver
Biographic Data
| ID | 3785893 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Silver |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Silver |
| SIGNATURE | SILVER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7650-0752 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Redness and Power
Appearing in the middle of the second installment of Tristram Shandy is the marbled leaf that Laurence Sterne called the “motly emblem of my work.” This essay traces just one reagent involved in the making of that page, the bright red pigment called “rose pink.” It offers a history of that book that takes it seriously as a luxury commodity manufactured in an empire for color. Readers wishing to receive a hand-painted sample of that pigment may re…
How to find acids with flowers: Robert Boyle’s ‘syrrup of violets’ and the chemistry of color indicators
The modernization of chemistry began with simple experiments on premodern compounds, gathered together in documents like Robert Boyle’s Experimental History of Colours (1664). Among these were a series of experiments with the syrup of violets, an everyday botanical extract which exhibits surprising color-changing qualities in acidic and alkaline solutions. This skill-share reconstructs several historical recipes for violet syrup, and discusses bo…
Sentiment Analysis and the Sentimental Novel
Hogarth's Networks and the Eighteenth-Century “Graphic” Novel
This article positions the eighteenth-century novel alongside contemporary developments in the modeling of complex systems, including Leonhard Euler's solution to the Königsberg bridge problem and William Hogarth's serial engravings. Unlike studies that apply network theory to literary forms like the early novel, it instead identifies a strain of network thinking in the arts characteristic of the British eighteenth century. At this junction betwe…
The Emergence of Texture
Crucial to accounts of complexity is the history of the concept of emergence. Pride of place is generally given to G. E. Lewes, who in 1879 offered a theory of "emergents," of the unpredictable and incommensurate effects which follow from the crossing of causes. This essay recovers an earlier tradition; it focuses on experiments in seventeenth-century materials science, which explain emergent properties through an appeal to microstructural "textu…
Satirical Objects
Satire has its objects: the people or practices towards which it is directed. But it also has plenty of objects, in the word’s materialist sense: things which are complexly related to satire’s rhetorical work. This chapter considers the double alignment of the goals of satire with its stuff, its objects with its objects, by looking at its strategies of defining and defending community boundaries. In the first place, satire creates and enforces so…
Information and Irony
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Contingency in philosophy and history, 1650-1800
This essay traces the history of a narrative and historiographic tension, of the inevitability that only appears after the fact. It offers a history of ‘contingency’, the modern affect that accompanies effects, the double-sensation of the inevitability of historical necessity with the knowledge that things might have been different. Tracing contingency through the literature and history of eighteenth-century Europe, it examines the historical dev…
Introduction: Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies
Bruno Latour’s formulation of modernity as a particular intertwining of persons and things has shaped recent efforts to rethink the legacy of the Enlightenment. What is more, Latour has often reverted to the eighteenth century as a site of origins—whether it is for the sort of practices that characterize the modern laboratory, the social formations that are the objects of Actor-Network Theory generally, and the kinds of false conceptual breaks th…
The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought
The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole
During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole's term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. …
The Politics of Gothic Historiography, 1660–1800
The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole
During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole's term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. …
The Politics of Gothic Historiography, 1660–1800
The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought
The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole
During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole's term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. …
Introduction: Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies
Bruno Latour’s formulation of modernity as a particular intertwining of persons and things has shaped recent efforts to rethink the legacy of the Enlightenment. What is more, Latour has often reverted to the eighteenth century as a site of origins—whether it is for the sort of practices that characterize the modern laboratory, the social formations that are the objects of Actor-Network Theory generally, and the kinds of false conceptual breaks th…
Contingency in philosophy and history, 1650-1800
This essay traces the history of a narrative and historiographic tension, of the inevitability that only appears after the fact. It offers a history of ‘contingency’, the modern affect that accompanies effects, the double-sensation of the inevitability of historical necessity with the knowledge that things might have been different. Tracing contingency through the literature and history of eighteenth-century Europe, it examines the historical dev…
Satirical Objects
Satire has its objects: the people or practices towards which it is directed. But it also has plenty of objects, in the word’s materialist sense: things which are complexly related to satire’s rhetorical work. This chapter considers the double alignment of the goals of satire with its stuff, its objects with its objects, by looking at its strategies of defining and defending community boundaries. In the first place, satire creates and enforces so…
Information and Irony
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
The Emergence of Texture
Crucial to accounts of complexity is the history of the concept of emergence. Pride of place is generally given to G. E. Lewes, who in 1879 offered a theory of "emergents," of the unpredictable and incommensurate effects which follow from the crossing of causes. This essay recovers an earlier tradition; it focuses on experiments in seventeenth-century materials science, which explain emergent properties through an appeal to microstructural "textu…
Hogarth's Networks and the Eighteenth-Century “Graphic” Novel
This article positions the eighteenth-century novel alongside contemporary developments in the modeling of complex systems, including Leonhard Euler's solution to the Königsberg bridge problem and William Hogarth's serial engravings. Unlike studies that apply network theory to literary forms like the early novel, it instead identifies a strain of network thinking in the arts characteristic of the British eighteenth century. At this junction betwe…
Sentiment Analysis and the Sentimental Novel
How to find acids with flowers: Robert Boyle’s ‘syrrup of violets’ and the chemistry of color indicators
The modernization of chemistry began with simple experiments on premodern compounds, gathered together in documents like Robert Boyle’s Experimental History of Colours (1664). Among these were a series of experiments with the syrup of violets, an everyday botanical extract which exhibits surprising color-changing qualities in acidic and alkaline solutions. This skill-share reconstructs several historical recipes for violet syrup, and discusses bo…
Redness and Power
Appearing in the middle of the second installment of Tristram Shandy is the marbled leaf that Laurence Sterne called the “motly emblem of my work.” This essay traces just one reagent involved in the making of that page, the bright red pigment called “rose pink.” It offers a history of that book that takes it seriously as a luxury commodity manufactured in an empire for color. Readers wishing to receive a hand-painted sample of that pigment may re…
History (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Law (4 works) · History (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Archaeology (2 works)