The experimental imagination: literary knowledge and science in the British Enlightenment

Abstract

This work of intellectual history and literary analysis traces the seemingly unexpected and yet illuminating links forged between natural philosophy, experimental science, literature, and the production of knowledge during the British Enlightenment in the long eighteenth century. Tita Chico achieves this through reference to literariness as an episteme; a means by which knowledge, science, and power act to exploit the imaginative possibilities open to literature. The ‘experimental imagination’ is defined by that which ‘concentrates on possibilities imagined, if not fully developed, when writers contemplate what a natural philosophical approach might be. For many in the long eighteenth century, natural philosophy requires the imaginative impulses available within a literary framework’ (10). Broken into five chapters, working variously towards this initial hypothesis, Chapter 1 (Literary Knowledge) explores the ways with which science emerges as a unique form of knowledge through the rise of the ‘experiment’. Here the turning away from an Aristotelian paradigm to that of ‘discovery’, in the seventeenth century, is given attention. Chico draws upon the doyens of this new intellectual paradigm, namely, Robert Hooke, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle, to reveal how literariness (through tropes, metaphors, and narrative) was deployed as a means to explore and communicate the new discoveries of experimental philosophy. Drawing further upon this mode of episteme as a legitimate means to knowledge, Chapter 2 (Immodest Witnesses) considers the antipodal scientific personality created in the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here science writing and novella establish and caricature the Gimcrack (a proper noun for the foolish scientist) and the coquette as literary exemplars of the intellectual parvenu. Gender most prominently surfaces to expose the scientific foil of the feminine as the slovenly advocate for serious and objective knowledge. Chapter 3 (Scientific Seduction) segues to the role specifically of ‘seduction’ in the employment of ‘characters in scientific dialogues’ (76). In this regard, Bacon famously remarks that his intellectual intent was to ‘penetrate unto the inner further recesses of nature . . . [to] find a way at length into her inner chambers’ (77). Here seduction plots are examined in the works of Fontenelle and Algarotti in relation to their works on teaching scientific ideas: