Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England

by Burchell,David; Cummins,Juliet

• ISBN13: 9780754657811
• ISBN10: 0754657817
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

'The fashioned image of poetry or the regular instruction of philosophy'? Truth utility and the natural sciences in early modern England

Mapping regeneration in The Winter's Tale

'A plain blunt man': Hobbes, science and rhetoric revisited

Reformed catechism and scientific method in Milton's Of Education and Paradise Lost

Rewriting the revolution: Milton, Bacon and the Royal Society rhetoricians

A philosophical duchess: understanding Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society

Literary responses to Robert Boyle's Natural Philosophy

Milton's Chaos in Pope's London

Global analogies: cosmology, geosymmetry and skepticism in some works of Aphra Benn

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.