Description: " Useful Knowledge can stand as a model of informed and scrupulous historicism. The breadth of Rauch's acquaintance with subliterary and paraliterary texts is truly impressive as he clearly lays out what was at stake for nineteenth-century intellectuals and usefully relates their preoccupations with those that concern us now, as we experience another information revolution."--Harriet Ritvo, author of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination "A welcome addition to humanistic analyses of science-in-culture. Rauch deftly blends science, history, and literature--novels, speculative fiction, encyclopedias--to explore cultural attitudes to the challenges of new knowledge during the Information Age of the early nineteenth century."--Ann B. Shteir, York University

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