Fictions of Knowledge Fact, Evidence, Doubt

by Batsaki, Yota; Mukherji, Subha; Schramm, Jan-Melissa

• ISBN13: 9780230277885
• ISBN10: 0230277888
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Locating literature at the intersection of distinct areas of thinking on the nature, scope and methods of knowledge - philosophy, theology, science, and the law - this book engages with literary texts across periods and genres to address questions of probability, problems of evidence, the uses of experiment and the poetics and ethics of doubt.

Author Biography

YOTA BATSAKI Fellow in Comparative Cultural Studies at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, USA. Prior to that she was Lecturer in English at St John's College, Cambridge, UK. She has published essays on the eighteenth-century novel; cultural translation; and the relationship between literature and sculpture; she has also co-edited a volume on Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space (Harvard UP, forthcoming).
SUBHA MUKHERJI Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Law and Representation in Early Modern England (CUP, 2006), and of numerous articles, mainly on Renaissance literature. She has co-edited Early Modern Tragicomedy (Boydell, 2007) and edited Thinking on Thresholds (Anthem, 2011). Her current book project is on the uses of doubt in early modern literature.
JAN-MELISSA SCHRAMM Fellow and Lecturer in English at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology, Vicarious Experience in Nineteenth-Century Narrative: Substitution, Imposture, Atonement (forthcoming), and a number of articles on the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; Y.Batsaki, S.Mukherji& J.M.Schramm
Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Evolution of a Concept; B.Shapiro
Providence, Experience and Doubt in Medieval England; C.Watkins
Law, Probability and Character in Shakespeare; L.Hutson
Trying, Knowing and Believing: Epistemic Plots and the Poetics of Doubt; S.Mukherji
The Anxiety of Variety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton and Bacon; K.Murphy
Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment; J.Bender
Lost in the Castle of Scepticism: Sceptical Philosophy as Gothic Romance; S.Kareem
From Alchemy to Experiment: The Political Economy of Experience in William Godwin's St Leon: A Tale of The Sixteenth Century; Y.Batsaki
Towards a Poetics of (Wrongful) Accusation: Innocence and Working-Class Voice in Mid-Victorian Fiction; J.M.Schramm
Afterword; M.Wood
Bibliography
Index