Empiricist Devotions
Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Published on 30. April 2016
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-8139-3838-7 (ISBN)
Description
Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established, Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist thinking in which the techniques and emphases of science, religion, and literature combined and cooperated. This brand of empiricism was committed to particularized scrutiny and epistemological modesty. It was Protestant in its enabling premises and meditative practices. It earnestly affirmed that figurative language provided crucial tools for interpreting the divinely written world. Smith recovers this empiricism in Robert Boyle's analogies, Isaac Newton's metaphors, John Locke's narratives, Joseph Addison's personifications, Daniel Defoe's diction, John Gay's periphrases, and Alexander Pope's descriptive particulars. She thereby demonstrates that ""literary"" language played a key role in shaping and giving voice to the concerns of eighteenth-century science and religion alike.
Empiricist Devotions combines intellectual history with close readings of a wide variety of texts, from sermons, devotional journals, and economic tracts to georgic poems, it-narratives, and microscopy treatises. This prizewinning book has important implications for our understanding of cultural and literary history, as scholars of the period's science have not fully appreciated figurative language's central role in empiricist thought, while scholars of its religion and literature have neglected the serious empiricist commitments motivating richly figurative devotional and poetic texts.
Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Empiricist Devotions combines intellectual history with close readings of a wide variety of texts, from sermons, devotional journals, and economic tracts to georgic poems, it-narratives, and microscopy treatises. This prizewinning book has important implications for our understanding of cultural and literary history, as scholars of the period's science have not fully appreciated figurative language's central role in empiricist thought, while scholars of its religion and literature have neglected the serious empiricist commitments motivating richly figurative devotional and poetic texts.
Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Reviews / Votes
Smith insightfully and persuasively reorients current discussions about literature and science in the long eighteenth century to account for the crosscurrents between science and religion. The readings are carefully and often brilliantly wrought, producing wonderful local insights within a larger reconsideration of the persistence of the occasional meditation mode in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The vast range of materials under Smith's purview-from natural theology and natural philosophy to poetry and economic history, for instance-reflects a sophisticated mind at work. Empiricist Devotions is extremely effective, thoughtful, and persuasive."" - Tita Chico, University of Maryland, author of Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture""As it probes the complex figural texture of religious, scientific, and literary language of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, Empiricist Devotions upends standard accounts of all three and demonstrates their deep affinities with one another. This nuanced and original book is a valuable corrective to the secularization thesis, one whose exquisite attention to all that language can be and do restores the possibility of devotion-and with it belief-to the empiricist and skeptical protocols long thought to have ruled them out."" - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, University of California, Irvine, author of Air's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Charlottesville
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
2 black & white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
518 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8139-3838-7 (9780813938387)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Courtney Weiss Smith
Empiricist Devotions
Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England
E-Book
04/2016
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
from
€111.99
Available for download
Person
Courtney Weiss Smith, Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University, USA, is the editor, with Kate Parker, of Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered.