Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution

Forms of Proof
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-42299-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 228 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Slater, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Sprachphilosophie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: A “Literary-Scientific Revolution?”

Chapter 1 – A New Concept of Motion: Allegory and the “Literary Revolution”

Chapter 2 – A Poetics of “Transfixion”: Dissecting Allegory in The Faerie Queene

Chapter 3 – Rethinking “Revolution”: Hamlet’s Astronomical Metaphors

Chapter 4 – The Ghost in the Machine: “Emotion” and Mind-Body Union from Hamlet to Descartes

Chapter 5 – Reading the “Book of Nature”: Allegory and Astronomy in Galileo and Kepler

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Slater is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Liberal and Integrative Studies at SUNY Brockport, USA, where he works on Renaissance drama, the intersections between literature and the history of science, and allegory. He has published articles on, among other texts, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, Othello, The Changeling, and Paradise Lost.