English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century (Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, 84)

This volume highlights the connections that link both literary discourse and the discourse about literature to the conceptual or representational frameworks, practices, and cognitive results (the 'truths') of disciplines such as psychology, medicine, epistemology, anthropology, cartography, chemistry, and rhetoric. Literature and the sciences, embedded as they are in specific historical circumstances, thus emerge as fields of inquiry and representation which share a number of assumptions and are determined or constructed by several modes of cross-fertilization. The range of authors examined includes Richard Brome, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Smollett, while emphasis is placed on how authors of literature regard the practices, practitioners and findings of science, as well as on how 'mimesis' intersects with scientific discourse. Contributors are Bernhard Klein, Daniel Essig García, George Rousseau, Jorge Bastos da Silva, Kate De Rycker, Maria Avxentevskaya, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, Mihaela Irimia, Richard Nate, and Wojciech Nowicki. English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century: A Trade for Light Copyright Contents List of Figures Introduction Forethought: A Trade for Light and the State of the Art Part 1: Engendering Space, Creating Meaning 1 Oroonoko and the Mapping of Africa 2 The Early Modern Couch: Richard Brome’s The Antipodes as Freudian Material 3 A World of One’s Own: Margaret Cavendish and the Science of Self-fashioning 4 The Arts Meet the Sciences in Exploring the Continent: Some Grand Tour Imagology Part 2: Forms of Discourse and Sociability 5 From Inventio to Invention: John Wilkins’ Mathematical Magick 6 “Quitting Now the Flowers of Rhetoric”: Anti-rhetorical Continuities in English Science and Literature 7 Reconnoitring and Recognizing: Modes of Knowledge in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks 8 Readers of Nerves and Tears: From Plague to Pamela 9 Quackery, “Chymistry” and Politics in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction Index