The Experimental Imagination

Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment

Tita Chico (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2018 | New edition
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5036-0544-2 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination 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 in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.

Tita Chico is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of Designing Women (2005).

Introduction
1. "Literary Knowledge"
2. "Immodest Witnesses"
3. "Scientific Seduction"
4. "Political Science"
5. "When Science Becomes Literature"

Erscheinungsdatum	13.06.2018
Zusatzinfo	3 halftones
Verlagsort	Palo Alto
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-5036-0544-2 / 1503605442
ISBN-13	978-1-5036-0544-2 / 9781503605442
Zustand	Neuware