The Poetics Of Scientific Investigation In Seventeenth Century England

Author : Claire Preston
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2015-12-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780191009976

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The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England by Claire Preston Pdf

The writing of science in the period 1580-1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and above all self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing — its rhetorical figures, neologisms, its uses of parody, romance, and various kinds of verse. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. Claire Preston argues that the rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How was science to be written in this period? That question, which piqued natural philosophers who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report, was initially resolved by the humanist rhetorical and generic skills in which they were already highly trained. At the same time non-scientific writers, enthralled by the developments of science, were quick to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medical practices. Practising scientists and inspired laymen or quasi-scientists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms, often collapsing the distinction between the factual and the imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain. Early-modern science and its literary vehicles are frequently indistinguishable, scientific practice and scientific expression mutually involved. Among the major writers discussed are Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, Browne, Lovelace, Boyle, Sprat, Oldenburg, Evelyn, Cowley, and Dryden.

Author : Claire Preston
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198704805

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The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-century England by Claire Preston Pdf

This study examines the way that scientists in the 16th and 17th centuries, who had not studied 'science' formally, used the tools of their literary education to formulate ideas about science and, at the same time, how the remarkable 17th-century scientific developments inspired non-scientific writers to make new fictions of discovery.

Author : Cassandra Gorman
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781843845935

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The Atom in Seventeenth-century Poetry by Cassandra Gorman Pdf

An investigation into the remarkable "poetics of the atom" in English literary texts from the mid to late seventeenth century. The early modern "atom" - understood as an indivisible particle of matter - captured the poetic imagination in ways that extended far beyond the reception of Lucretius and Epicurean atomism. Contrarily to fears of atomisation and materialist threat, many poets and philosophers of the period sought positive, spiritual motivation in the concept of material indivisibility. This book traces the metaphysical import of these poetic atoms, teasing out an affinity between poetic and atomic forms in seventeenth-century texts. In the writings of Henry More, Thomas Traherne, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter and Lucy Hutchinson, both atoms and poems were instrumental in acts of creating, ordering and reconstructing knowledge. Their poems emerge as exquisitely self-conscious atomic forms, producing intimate reflections on the creative power and indivisibility of self, soul and God. The book begins with a survey of the imaginative possibilities surrounding the early modern "atom", before considering the indivisible centres of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More's cosmic, Spenserian poetics. The focus then turns to the lyrical bond formed between atom and soul in the writings of Thomas Traherne, and from there, to the experimental sequences of Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter, whose poetic spaces create new worlds and imagine alternative lives. The book concludes with a study of Lucy Hutchinson's creation poem Order and Disorder, which anticipates the regeneration of fallen being in atomic and alchemical terms.

Author : Edmund Gosse
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 1883
Category : English literature
ISBN : HARVARD:32044094198702

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Seventeenth-century Studies by Edmund Gosse Pdf

Author : Philip Major
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000712131

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Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature by Philip Major Pdf

Author of plays, love-lyrics, essays and, among other works, The Civil War, the Davideis and the Pindarique Odes, Abraham Cowley made a deep impression on seventeenth-century letters, attested by his extravagant funeral and his burial next to Chaucer and Spenser in Westminster Abbey. Ejected from Cambridge for his politics, he found refuge in royalist Oxford before seeing long service as secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria, and as a Crown agent, on the continent. In the mid-1650s he returned to England, was imprisoned and made an accommodation with the Cromwellian regime. This volume of essays provides the modern critical attention Cowley’s life and writings merit.

Author : Alexander Wragge-Morley
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2020-04-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780226680866

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Aesthetic Science by Alexander Wragge-Morley Pdf

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Author : Elizabeth Scott-Baumann,Danielle Clarke,Sarah C. E. Ross
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 897 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2023-01-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198860631

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The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann,Danielle Clarke,Sarah C. E. Ross Pdf

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

Author : Vera Keller
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2023-04-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9781421445939

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The Interlopers by Vera Keller Pdf

A reframing of how scientific knowledge was produced in the early modern world. Many accounts of the scientific revolution portray it as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior. According to these views, scientists such as Francis Bacon produced certain knowledge by pacifying their emotions and concentrating on method. In The Interlopers, Vera Keller rejects this emphasis on discipline and instead argues that what distinguished early modernity was a navigation away from restraint and toward the violent blending of knowledge from across society and around the globe. Keller follows early seventeenth-century English "projectors" as they traversed the world, pursuing outrageous entrepreneurial schemes along the way. These interlopers were developing a different culture of knowledge, one that aimed to take advantage of the disorder created by the rise of science and technological advances. They sought to deploy the first submarine in the Indian Ocean, raise silkworms in Virginia, and establish the English slave trade. These projectors developed a culture of extreme risk-taking, uniting global capitalism with martial values of violent conquest. They saw the world as a riskscape of empty spaces, disposable people, and unlimited resources. By analyzing the disasters—as well as a few successes—of the interlopers she studies, Keller offers a new interpretation of the nature of early modern knowledge itself. While many influential accounts of the period characterize European modernity as a disciplining or civilizing process, The Interlopers argues that early modernity instead entailed a great undisciplining that entangled capitalism, colonialism, and science.

Author : Gillian Wright
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-10-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108493970

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The Restoration Transposed by Gillian Wright Pdf

An innovative account of the literary Restoration that stresses its diversity, historical self-awareness, and openness to new voices.

Author : Catherine G. Martin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2019-04-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780429595509

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Milton in the New Scientific Age by Catherine G. Martin Pdf

Milton and the New Scientific Age represents significant advantages over all previous volumes on the subject of Milton and science, as it includes contributions from top scholars and prominent beginners in a broad number of fields. Most of these fields have long dominated work in both Milton and seventeenth-century studies, but they have previously not included the relatively new and revolutionary topic of early modern chemistry, physiology, and medicine. Previously this subject was confined to the history of science, with little if any attention to its literary development, even though it prominently appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which also includes early "science fiction" speculations on aliens ignored by most readers. Both of these oversights are corrected in this essay collection, while more traditional areas of research have been updated. They include Milton’s relationship both to Bacon and the later or Royal Society Baconians, his views on astronomy, and his "vitalist" views on biology and cosmology. In treating these topics, our contributors are not mired in speculations about whether or not Milton was on the cutting edge of early science or science fiction, for, as nearly all of them show, the idea of a "cutting edge" is deeply anachronistic at a time when most scientists and scientific enthusiasts held both fully modern and backward-looking beliefs. By treating these combinations contextually, Milton’s literary contributions to the "new science" are significantly clarified along with his many contemporary sources, all of which merit study in their own right.

Author : Howard Marchitello,Evelyn Tribble
Publisher : Springer
Page : 544 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137463616

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The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science by Howard Marchitello,Evelyn Tribble Pdf

This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

Author : Frances E. Dolan
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2020-07-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780812252330

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Digging the Past by Frances E. Dolan Pdf

A detailed study of seventeenth century farming practices and their relevance for today We are today grappling with the consequences of disastrous changes in our farming and food systems. While the problems we face have reached a crisis point, their roots are deep. Even in the seventeenth century, Frances E. Dolan contends, some writers and thinkers voiced their reservations, both moral and environmental, about a philosophy of improvement that rationalized massive changes in land use, farming methods, and food production. Despite these reservations, the seventeenth century was a watershed in the formation of practices that would lead toward the industrialization of agriculture. But it was also a period of robust and inventive experimentation in what we now think of as alternative agriculture. This book approaches the seventeenth century, in its failed proposals and successful ventures, as a resource for imagining the future of agriculture in fruitful ways. It invites both specialists and non-specialists to see and appreciate the period from the ground up. Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the seventeenth century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows. Dolan analyzes the stories seventeenth-century writers told one another in letters, diaries, and notebooks, in huge botanical catalogs and flimsy pamphlets, in plays, poems, and how-to guides, in adages and epics. She digs deeply to assess precisely how and with what effect key terms, figurations, and stories galvanized early modern imaginations and reappear, often unrecognized, on the websites and in the tour scripts of farms and vineyards today.

Author : Pamela S. Hammons,Brandie R. Siegfried
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2021-12-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781108831154

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World-Making Renaissance Women by Pamela S. Hammons,Brandie R. Siegfried Pdf

This collection affirms the shaping authority of early modern women in literature and culture, evident well beyond their own moment.

Author : John Lee
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2017-08-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781118458778

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A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies by John Lee Pdf

Provides a detailed map of contemporary critical theory in Renaissance and Early Modern English literary studies beyond Shakespeare A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is a groundbreaking guide to the contemporary engagement with critical theory within the larger disciplinary area of Renaissance and Early Modern studies. Comprising commissioned contributions from leading international scholars, it provides an overview of literary theory, beyond Shakespeare, focusing on most major figures, as well as some lesser-known writers of the period. This book represents an important first step in bridging the divide between the abundance of titles which explore applications of theory in Shakespeare studies, and the relative lack of such texts concerning English Literary Renaissance studies as a whole, which includes major figures such as Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. The tripartite structure offers a map of the critical landscape so that students can appreciate the breadth of the work being done, along with an exploration of the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time. Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is must-reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern and Renaissance English literature, as well as their instructors and advisors. Divided into three main sections, “Conditions of Subjectivity,” “Spaces, Places, and Forms,” and “Practices and Theories,” A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies: Provides an overview of theoretical work and the theoretical-informed competencies which are central to the teaching of English Renaissance literary studies beyond Shakespeare Provides a map of the critical landscape of the field to provide students with an opportunity to appreciate the breadth of the work done Features newly-commissioned essays in representative subject areas to offer a clear picture of the contemporary theoretically-engaged work in the field Explores the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time Offers examples of the ways in which the practice of a theoretically-engaged criticism may enrich the personal and professional lives of critics, and the culture in which such critical practice takes place

Author : Michaël Green,Lars Cyril Nørgaard,Mette Birkedal Bruun
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2021-12-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9789004153073

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Early Modern Privacy by Michaël Green,Lars Cyril Nørgaard,Mette Birkedal Bruun Pdf

An examination of instances, experiences, and spaces of early modern privacy. It opens new avenues to understanding the structures and dynamics that shape early modern societies through examination of a wide array of sources, discourses, practices, and spatial programmes.