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The reassessment of the 'two cultures' of art and science has been one of the most urgent areas of research in literary and historical studies over the last fifteen years. The early modern period is an ideal site for such an investigation precisely because of the pre-disciplinary nature of its science. The central focus of The Machine in the Text falls upon the wide-ranging practices of what will come to be called 'science' prior to its separation into a realm of its own, one of the legacies of the renaissance and its encounter with modernity. This book offers a new critical examination of the complex and mutually-sustaining relationship between literature and science - and, more broadly, art and nature - in the early modern period. Redefining literature and art as knowledge-producing practices and, at the same time, recasting the practices of emergent science as imaginative and creative and literary, Howard Marchitello argues for a more complex understanding of early modern culture in which the scientific can be said to produce the literary and the literary can be said to produce the scientific. Drawing upon recent work in the field of science studies and focusing on selected works of major writers of the period - including Bacon, Donne, Galileo, and Shakespeare, among others - he recovers a range of early modern discursive and cultural practices for a new account of the linked histories of science and literature.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• List of Illustrations(p. xi)
• 1 Introduction: Science Studies and Early Modern Literature and Culture(p. 1)
• 2 Gray's Inn Revels, 1594-5(p. 24)
• 3 Hamlet's Machine(p. 51)
• 4 Galileo's Telescope(p. 86)
• 5 John Donne's New Science Writing(p. 116)
• 6 Nature's Art(p. 154)
• 7 Time's Arrow(p. 185)
• 8 Conclusion: Being Archaic(p. 214)
• References(p. 220)
• Index(p. 231)

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CHOICE Review

To begin, Marchitello (Rutgers Univ.) offers a brief overview of the influence of science on early modern literature and recognizes the recent wave of "vast and various" critics studying these two cultures. The author contributes to the ongoing discussion by focusing on various "machines," broadly defined, that produced certain forms of knowledge, each contributing to the understanding of art, science, and nature. For example, he offers Gesta Grayorum (1688) as a record of Christmas activities at the Inns of Court; the machine in Hamlet is the Shakespearean stage. In a chapter titled "Galileo's Telescope," he makes explicit the conflict between religion and science. Another literary machine is John Donne's autobiographical "new science writing" found in his Devotions. Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and the early modern garden are ideal for consideration of the natural and artificial. For new historicists, this is a valuable study, well documented and generously peppered with footnotes. Eleven pages of references are divided into primary (literary and scientific) and secondary texts. Dense and wide-ranging, this interdisciplinary study will be valuable for those interested in the "complex and mutually sustaining ... relationship between early modern science and literary culture." Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. J. S. Carducci Winona State University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Howard Marchitello is Associate Professor, Department of English, Rutgers University.