The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780192867032)

How should science be written? It is a question that piqued natural philosophers of the seventeenth century as they experimented with the rhetorical figures, neologisms, verse-forms, and generic variety that characterise the literary texture of their work. Inspired laymen were quick to borrow from the new philosophy and from practising scientists in order to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Between them, scientists, natural historians, poets, dramatists, and essayists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England examines those forms and that literary-scientific texture, as well as representations of the scientific--the laboratory, collaborative experimental retirement, and the canons of scientific conversation--and proposes that the writing of seventeenth-century science mirrors the intellectual and investigative processes of early modern science itself.

Author: Claire Preston
ISBN-10: 0192867032
ISBN-13: 9780192867032
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 10/28/2022
Pages: 310
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.98h x 5.34w x 0.67d