Open AccessBook
The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The experimental imagination in the British Enlightenment is explored in this paper, where the authors describe how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds.Abstract:
This book is about experimental imagination in the British Enlightenment. It tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds. Early scientists used metaphor to define the phenomena they studied. They likewise used metaphor to imagine themselves into their roles as experimentalists. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British literature includes countless references to early science to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge, whose truths challenge the dominant account of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non epistemological innovation of the long eighteenth century. The Experimental Imagination considers traditional scientific writings alongside poems, plays, and prose works by canonical and non-canonical authors to argue that ideas about science facilitated new forms of evidence and authority. The noisy satiric rancor and quiet concern that science generated among science advocates, dramatists, essayists, and poets reveal a doubled epistemological trajectory: experimental observation utilizes imaginative speculation and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding. Early scientific practice requires yet often obscures that imaginative impulse, which literary knowledge embraces as a way of understanding the world at large. Reciprocally, the period’s theory of aesthetics arises from the observational protocols of science, ultimately laying claim to literature as epistemologically superior. Early science finds its intellectual and conceptual footing in the metaphoric thinking available through literary knowledge, and literary writers wield science as a trope for the importance and unique insights of literary knowledge.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Sleep and stress management in Enlightenment literature and poetry.
Clark Lawlor,Ashleigh Blackwood +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that information about managing stress and sleep was delivered to a wide public audience, not only in prose self-help manuals, but also in ‘regimen’ poetry written by doctors.
Journal ArticleDOI
XI The Eighteenth Century
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama; Section 1 is by Jill Dye; Section 2 is by Danni Glover; Section 3 is by Robert Scott; Section 4 is by James Harriman-Smith.
Book ChapterDOI
Earth: The Cradle of the Anthropocene
TL;DR: The authors explores the historical, scientific, and theoretical contexts of the early Anthropocene, with particular focus on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theories of Earth in geology and astronomy, and establishes parallels between scientific and literary imaginings of Earth and its climate.