Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

Autorentext

Juliet Cummins is Honorary Research Advisor in the English Department at the University of Queensland, Australia. David Burchell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

Inhalt

Contents: Introduction; 'The fashioned image of poetry or the regular instruction of philosophy'? Truth utility and the natural sciences in early modern England, Peter Harrison; Mapping regeneration in The Winter's Tale, Anne Sutherland; 'A plain blunt man': Hobbes, science and rhetoric revisited, David Burchell; Reformed catechism and scientific method in Milton's Of Education and Paradise Lost, Angelica Duran; Rewriting the revolution: Milton, Bacon and the Royal Society rhetoricians, Catherine Gimelli Martin; A philosophical duchess: understanding Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society, Peter Dear; Literary responses to Robert Boyle's Natural Philosophy, Peter Anstey; Milton's Chaos in Pope's London, Sophie Gee; Global analogies: cosmology, geosymmetry and skepticism in some works of Aphra Benn, Robert Markley; Bibliography; Index.