The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture

Contemporary ideals of science representing disinterested and objective fields of investigation have their origins in the 17th century. However, new science did not simply or uniformly replace earlier beliefs about the workings of the natural world, but entered into competition with them. It is this complex process of competition and negotiation concerning ways of seeing the natural world that is charted by the essays in this book. The collection traces the many overlaps between literary and scientific discourses as writers in this period attempted both to understand imaginatively and empirically the workings of the natural world, and shows that a discrete separation between such discourses and spheres is untenable.