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Science Studies and English Renaissance Literature
Author(s) -
Marchitello Howard
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00318.x
Subject(s) - scientism , dialectic , criticism , epistemology , relation (database) , aesthetics , rationalism , literary criticism , history of science , sociology , enlightenment , literature , philosophy , art , database , computer science
The study of early modern science has been a topic of serious interest to literary scholars since at least the 1920s. This essay examines the history of this interest and the critical work it has engendered. In its first wave, this criticism was especially devoted to the study of the ways in which early modern science influenced – and was thereby reflected in – imaginative writing of the period. This understanding was itself underwritten by prevailing notions of science as both an autonomous and a privileged discourse governed by an irresistible and ever‐evolving rationalism that staked exclusive claims to truth. Recent work in the expanding fields of science studies over the past twenty years, however, has served to dislodge this scientific exceptionalism and radically to recast both the history of science and our understanding of the nature of science. As a result, in second wave criticism of early modern science and literature, literary culture is no longer believed to exist in a merely reflective relation to the disciplines of science; instead, science and literature are set in a creative dialectic with each other that denies priority and scientism and helps to offer a more powerful understanding of the dynamic between these two complexly related cultural practices.