The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England

The writing of science in the period 158-17 is artfully diffidently carelessly boldly and above all self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing - its rhetorical figures neologisms its uses of parody romance and various kinds of verse. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations ofthe laboratory of collaborative retirement of virtual epistolary conversation and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. Claire Preston argues that the rhetorical generic and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern scienceitself. How was science to be written in this period? That question which piqued natural philosophers who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report was initially resolved by the humanist rhetorical and generic skills in which they were already highly trained. At the same time non-scientific writers enthralled by the developments of science were quick to deploy ideas and images from astronomy optics chemistry biology and medical practices. Practising scientistsand inspired laymen or quasi-scientists produced new adjusted or hybrid literary forms often collapsing the distinction between the factual and the imaginative between the rhetorically ornate and the plain. Early-modern science and its literary vehicles are frequently indistinguishablescientific practice and scientific expression mutually involved. Among the major writers discussed are Montaigne Bacon Donne Browne Lovelace Boyle Sprat Oldenburg Evelyn Cowley and Dryden.