Sarkar, Debapriya (Author)
This dissertation argues that the emergence of a new intellectual paradigm I call "possible knowledge"--encompassing projective, probable, counterfactual, hypothetical, conjectural, and prophetic ways of thinking--shaped literary and scientific writing in Renaissance England. The project uncovers a prehistory of scientific probability, still perceived as an Enlightenment-era phenomenon, by focusing on a constellation of speculative modes of knowing that drew on the imagination in the face of epistemic uncertainty. Possible knowledge emerges from elements crucial to our understanding of the literary, including mimesis, utopian discourse, and dramatic enactment, and it crosses generic boundaries. The disruption of prophetic certainty, for instance, informs the action in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, while the unrepeatable epic events in John Milton's Paradise Lost reveal why contemporary experimental methods--which could produce only probable knowledge about the natural world--were insufficient to explicate prelapsarian states of being. I engage with the history and philosophy of science to show how the techniques of writing associated with possible knowledge are visible across modern disciplinary divides: the error and the endlessness that govern Edmund Spenser's epic-romance, The Faerie Queene, are at the heart of the modern scientific epistemology laid out in Francis Bacon's inductive method. And as Margaret Cavendish's utopian experiment with cognitive realms in The Blazing World underscores, possibility could allow authors intellectual freedom and creativity in their engagement with the material world. By focusing on hypothetical and suppositional modes of thinking, I map the contours of the humanities and the sciences as these began to assume their modern disciplinary forms.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 76/01(E), Jul 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1609375586.
Book
Cummins, Juliet;
Burchell, David;
(2007)
Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB000774600/)
Book
Bowerbank, Sylvia Lorraine;
(2004)
Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB000520064/)
Chapter
Spates, William;
(2010)
Shakespeare and the Irony of Early Modern Disease Metaphor and Metonymy
(/isis/citation/CBB001253087/)
Book
Jackie Bennett;
Andrew Lawson;
(2016)
Shakespeare's Gardens
(/isis/citation/CBB702535308/)
Chapter
Rees, Emma L. E.;
(2010)
Cordelia's Can't: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear
(/isis/citation/CBB001253084/)
Thesis
Moshenska, Joseph;
(2011)
“Feeling Pleasures”: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567300/)
Thesis
Slater, Michael Derick;
(2013)
Literary and Scientific Revolutions in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567460/)
Book
Patrick J. Murray;
(2022)
Intellectual and Imaginative Cartographies in Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB171349738/)
Thesis
Sugar, Gabrielle;
(2012)
The New Universe: Conceptions of the Cosmos in the Literary Imagination of Early Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567357/)
Book
Floyd-Wilson, Mary;
(2013)
Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage
(/isis/citation/CBB001552908/)
Chapter
Vita Fortunati;
(2003)
La vecchiaia in Shakespeare fra mito e scienza
(/isis/citation/CBB558765478/)
Book
Peterson, Kaara L.;
(2010)
Popular Medicine, Hysterical Disease, and Social Controversy in Shakespeare's England
(/isis/citation/CBB001231041/)
Thesis
Carr, Kevin Matthew;
(2013)
A Theater of the Senses: A Cultural History of Theatrical Effects in Early-Modern England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567443/)
Book
Wallwork, Jo;
Salzman, Paul;
(2011)
Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas
(/isis/citation/CBB001250683/)
Article
Thell, Anne M.;
(2015)
“[A]s Lightly as Two Thoughts”: Motion, Materialism, and Cavendish's Blazing World
(/isis/citation/CBB001550674/)
Chapter
Evans, Meredith;
(2013)
Matrices of Force: Spinozist Monism and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
(/isis/citation/CBB001201711/)
Book
Suparna Roychoudhury;
(2018)
Phantasmatic Shakespeare: Imagination in the Age of Early Modern Science
(/isis/citation/CBB332587620/)
Thesis
Lellock, Jasmine Shay;
(2013)
Staged Magic in Early English Drama
(/isis/citation/CBB001567463/)
Book
Blank, Paula;
(2006)
Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man
(/isis/citation/CBB000772132/)
Thesis
Liou, Jennifer Hwa Yu;
(2013)
“This Rough Magic”: Experimental Literature in Seventeenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB001567436/)
Be the first to comment!