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  1. Home
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  3. Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature
  • Cited by 39
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2009
Print publication year:
2004
Online ISBN:
9780511484018
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511484018
Subjects:
Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, History, History of Science: General Interest
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (46)
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Book description

Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature (from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fictions of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish). The book documents how what have become our two cultures of belief define themselves through a shared aesthetics that understands knowledge as an act of making. Within this framework, literary texts gain substance and intelligibility by being considered as instances of early modern knowledge production. At the same time, early modern science maintains strong affiliations with poetry because it understands art as a basis for producing knowledge. In identifying these interconnections between literature and science, this book contributes to scholarship in literary history, history of reading and the book, science studies and the history of academic disciplines.

Reviews

‘Nowadays, we tend to think of science and literature as two cultures which have little in common, but Elizabeth Spiller's excellent study, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, explores an age when these disciplines were united by a ‘shared aesthetics of knowledge’. Spiller skilfully dismantles our current assumption that ‘literature is fiction and science is fact’, arguing that early modern writers understood that ‘knowledge involves form as well as content … Spiller's perceptive parallel readings of texts usually kept separate is a valuable addition to scholarship on the early modern period, as well as to the study of science and literature.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

‘Original, learned and compelling. Spiller's superb discussion of Cavendish places her appropriately in very serious company.‘

Source: Studies in English Literature

‘… richly-documented pages, written in a clear and pleasant style …'

Source: Cahiers Élisabéthains

‘… a rewarding contribution to the intersections between literature and natural philosophy. … powerful and rewarding, in large part thanks to her striking combinations of authors within chapters and her vigorous readings of a wide range of texts.‘

Source: Minerva

'… she has opened the door to a complicated and complex area of study. Her linking of these radically different writers in seemingly disparate disciplines, her focus on sensory perception, and her discussion of the generation of knowledge are perceptive and illuminating … the book is well worth the read.'

Dr John Holmes - Lecturer in English, University of Reading

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