The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing

by John Limon

• ISBN13: 9780521352512
• ISBN10: 0521352517
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1990-02-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

In this major new book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne - three highly articulate and highly alarmed witnesses to the professionalisation of science, the great crisis in modern intellectual history. It was, he argues, especially specially difficult for American writers to face this crisis since they could make no appeal to traditional values: America, after all, had never really been a pre-scientific society.In this major new book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne - three highly articulate and highly alarmed witnesses to the professionalisation of science, the great crisis in modern intellectual history. It was, he argues, especially specially difficult for American writers to face this crisis since they could make no appeal to traditional values: America, after all, had never really been a pre-scientific society.

Table of Contents

Toward a disciplinary intellectual history

Brown's epistemology

Poe's methodology

Hawthorne's technology

After the revolutions: Brown and Dreiser, Poe and Pynchon, Hawthorne and Mailer

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