Abstract
Science and imaginative literature have made a dynamic pair of objects for study ever since they were sharply and categorically separated as activities of the mind and kinds of representations: To study them in tandem, at least for literary historians and critics, is to confront the embarrassing question, What is “literature”? – a question harder and harder to answer, and not to be answered here. The relations between science and literature (and early printed book production) have seemed especially interesting since about 1980, as scholars in historical fields have come more and more to poach on each other’s lands and goods. During the advent of cultural studies, especially in the work and thought of certain French historians and philosophers interested in science (e.g., Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, and Michel de Certeau), the canons of literary history expanded as the study of “discourse” and “representation” relieved it of an older focus restricted to particular authors and genres.Marjorie Hope Nicolson, perhaps the greatest student of “science and literature” writing in English in the first half of the twentieth century, is known above all for her work on the opening up of “space” (in its modern sense) to the literary imagination in such books as Newton Demands the Muse (1946), Voyages to the Moon (1948), and the articles collected in Science and Imagination (1956). Nicolson’s primary interest was in canonical English literature and the opportunities provided for it by the materials and potential metaphors of the “new science.” Her contemporary, the British historian Frances Yates, brought a similar sense of the relationship of (pan-European) scientific activity and imaginative literature to her account of Love’s Labours Lost (1598) and its real-life model (according to Yates), London’s late sixteenth-century “School of Night,” to which such Renaissance luminaries as Walter Raleigh (ca. 1554–1618), mathematician, linguist, and colonialist Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), the poet George Chapman (ca. 1559–1634), and the renegade philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) belonged or were visitors.