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Literature and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions
Author(s) -
Drury Joseph
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12395
Subject(s) - enlightenment , rhetorical question , poetry , field (mathematics) , politics , literature , sociology , history , epistemology , social science , aesthetics , political science , philosophy , art , law , mathematics , pure mathematics
Despite predictions of its impending doom in the late 1970s, the field of literature and science continues to flourish, especially among scholars of eighteenth‐century British literature. This essay identifies four main areas of research in this field: poetry and performance, fiction, new ontologies, and politics and gender. It argues that although scholars continue to study the influence of scientific ideas on literary texts, the most ambitious new work explores the relationship between science and literature through the analysis of shared rhetorical practices and common epistemological and ontological structures.