ABSTRACT
The Introduction considers how Victorian poets and scientists described language and poetic form in terms of excess. I argue that this shared vocabulary offered poets a new way of theorizing about the political effects of language in a time of dramatic social change. I discuss philology’s relative neglect in nineteenth-century literature and science studies, and I show how recent calls for a new formalism invite a greater attention to theories of language in the period. I then turn to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) to demonstrate how scientific ideas about language intersected with radical politics.
