Humphry Davy: The experimental self
Abstract
This essay examines the career of Humphry Davy against a background of the development of disciplinary structures in science and the exploration of individual subjectivity in the Romantic period. I show how Davy constructed a charismatic persona for himself as a scientific lecturer and researcher with his deployment of spectacular and powerful chemical instrumentation. Doing so, he both exploited and consolidated new institutional and disciplinary formations. I also show how Davy’s career called for continuous self-fashioning in a changing social milieu, how demands for more thoroughgoing institutional reform sidelined him, and how he was subjected to ridicule in a context of unstable gender-relations. Davy’s case suggests that the establishment of disciplinary institutions had a complex relationship to formations of personal identity, and that the career of a charismatic individual in such institutions could be a precarious one.
Department
History
Publication Date
9-1-2011
Journal Title
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Golinski, J.V. “Humphry Davy: The experimental self,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (2011), 15-28.
Rights
© 2011 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies