The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England

By: Claire Preston

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Paperback | 28 July 2022

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310 Pages

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22.81 x 13.56 x 1.7

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How should science be written? It is a question that piqued natural philosophers of the seventeenth century as they experimented with the rhetorical figures, neologisms, verse-forms, and generic variety that characterise the literary texture of their work. Inspired laymen were quick to borrow from the new philosophy and from practising scientists in order to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Between them, scientists, natural historians, poets, dramatists, and essayists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England examines those forms and that literary-scientific texture, as well as representations of the scientific--the laboratory, collaborative experimental retirement, and the canons of scientific conversation--and proposes that the writing of seventeenth-century science mirrors the intellectual and investigative processes of early modern science itself.

Industry Reviews

It is no wonder that Claire Preston's scrupulously well-researched The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England is such a pleasure to read ... Inspired by Enlightenment reason and Brownian fecundity alike, Preston's study does right by both the early modern era and our own. * Wendy Beth Hyman, Renaissance Quarterly *
Preston's argument marries rhetorical elegance with the patterned clarity of the quincunxes admired by [Thomas] Browne. * Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 *
The book asks not a new question but an important one: what do or can science and the humanities say to each other, what do they have in common? * Clio Doyle, Los Angeles Review of Books *
This book offers an important framework for understanding the variety of intersecting and dialogic interactions between natural history and imaginative writing during the early modern period and beyond. * George E. Haggerty, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
Claire Preston's book is a stimulating and wide-ranging analysis of the nexus between science and literature in the age of the putative English scientific revolution. * Robert J. Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography *

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