Tita Chico

The Experimental Imagination:

Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment 

Stanford University Press, 2018

Cloth ISBN: 9781503605442

Paper ISBN: 9781503613591
Digital ISBN: 9781503606456

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"a landmark contribution to both literary studies

and the history of science and technology"

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"a tremendous addition to scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature, science, intellectual history, aesthetics, gender, and Enlightenment as well as the intellectual functions of literature more generally."

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My work on the dressing room in The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2005) yielded a surprising connection to my current interest in science studies: I discovered a play in which a young woman converts her dressing room into a scientific laboratory, transforming the accouterment of fashionable London life—a lapdog, jewels—into objects for scientific inquiry. Fascinated by the seemingly casual presence of science dramatized in the daily life of a young heiress, and how this practice enabled her a certain amount of independence and agency, I began to consider more broadly what science might have meant to an eighteenth-century readership. I discovered that science could connote variously: insight or blindness; discovery or irrelevance; individual agency or wasteful self-interestedness; legitimacy or illicitness; civil society or social upheaval; modern enlightenment or trivial novelty. It could signal moral self-improvement and disinterestedness; or it could leave practitioners socially outcast and helpless in the marketplace. It could be conservative. It could be subversive.

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Challenging the “two cultures” debate, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2018), tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. I show that early science relied on what I term “literary knowledge” to present its experimental findings. More radically, I contend that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, “literary knowledge” challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.

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The representation of early science persistently reveals its literary status—not merely in the use of literary language and thinking in scientific writing and practice, but also through science as a metaphor that allows writers to posit alternative models of authority and evidence. The narrative I tell in this book is one of other possibilities, paths imagined as viable, reasonable, and superior to the unreliability and even danger of scientific knowledge acquisition. Through close readings of scientific treatises and guidebooks, plays, periodicals, satires, and poems by scientists and writers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, and James Thomson, I recover doubts about science’s efficacy and beliefs in literature’s insights, and adjust our critical lens so we can see clearly the historical moment when what we now think of as literature and science were not distinguished as distinct epistemologies, but were understood as deeply, if sometimes awkwardly, implicated in one another. Early scientific practice requires yet often obscures that imaginative impulse; literary knowledge embraces this impulse as a way of understanding the world at large. Literary knowledge gains value because it relies upon the imagination as a source of truth, which simultaneously reflects upon the limits of science and implicitly articulates the lines of difference that eventually define the boundary between the arts and sciences.

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"Tita Chico’s The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment does no less than offer a landmark contribution to both literary studies and the history of science and technology….Chico’s study offers a timely, relevant, and consistently exciting set of arguments.... The Experimental Imagination’s theoretical and methodological lenses serve as a call to arms for scholars of these fields to perform more nuanced intersectional work that will productively explore how issues of race, gender, and power amplify, echo, and inform literary-scientific discourse in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries and beyond.”—Danielle Spratt, Digital Defoe

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"Chico sketches out what she calls the 'experimental imagination,' a mixture of plot forms and rhetorical aesthetics, which underwrites the profound social and cultural transformations of the British Enlightenment. She traces the long, difficult disentanglement of objectivity from poetry and romance — or, really, the construction of objectivity as one creative mode of discourse among others.”—Sean Silver, Los Angeles Review of Books

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“Lively and accessible... The Experimental Imagination offers up some rich, highly suggestive texts that confirm the idea that the literary imagination was integral to the development of early science.”—Sharon Ruston, Times Literary Supplement

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"The Experimental Imagination constitutes a tremendous addition to scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British literature, science, intellectual history, aesthetics, gender, and Enlightenment as well as the intellectual functions of literature more generally. It usefully extends the archive of what constitutes and concerns scientific writing in the period, ... opening vast potential for subsequent critical conversation, forcefully calling yet more literary and historical knowledge into being." —J. Ereck Jarvis, The Review of English Studies

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"The Experimental Imagination powerfully models how literary texts are central to understanding the history of science despite the field’s historical resistance to the literary. ... [Her] framework of affective epistemology opens new avenues for thinking about the unique role of feeling in histories of science." — Travis Chi Wing Lau, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 

 

"Chico brings a fresh approach to the thorny problem of assessing the nature of science in the Enlightenment period, and in particular the history of its relationships with other areas of enquiry." — Patricia Fara, The British Journal for the History of Science

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"In this excellent book, Tita Chico considers literary technique alongside modes of scientific enquiry ... [and] adds important insight to scholarship dealing with the history of the relations between literature and science in the Enlightenment." — Jonathan Lamb, Journal for British Studies

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"This is an insightful and enviably disciplined book about a predisciplinary moment." — Jayne Lewis, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

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“The Experimental Imagination is like an Enlightenment experiment, altering and interrogating the nature of historical matter in order to unveil new intellectual and imaginative understandings.” — Aaron Gabriel Montalvo, Modern Language Review