Details

Subject(s)

• Literature and science—History—17th century [Browse]
• Allegory [Browse]
• Europe—Intellectual life—17th century [Browse]

Series

Routledge studies in Renaissance literature and culture [More in this series]

Summary note

"Tropes & 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN

• 9781032422718 (hardcover)
• 1032422718 (hardcover)
• 9781032422992 (paperback)
• 1032422998 (paperback)

LCCN

2023052066

OCLC

1406019847

Statement on language in description

Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...