| Author |
Ait-Touati, Frédérique |
| Year |
2011 |
| Publisher |
Chicago: University of Chicago Press |
| Number of pages |
272 |
| ISBN |
9780226011226 |
| Keywords |
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Abstract
Amazon (2013):
In today’s academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected,
one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period
between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so
distinct. Just as the natural philosophers of the era were discovering in and adopting
from literature new strategies and techniques for their discourse, so too were poets
and storytellers finding inspiration in natural philosophy, particularly in astronomy.
A work that speaks to the history of science and literary studies, Fictions of the
Cosmos explores the evolving relationship that ensued between fiction and astronomical
authority. By examining writings of Kepler, Godwin, Hooke, Cyrano, Cavendish, Fontenelle,
and others, Frédérique Aït-Touati shows that it was through the telling of stories—such
as through accounts of celestial journeys—that the Copernican hypothesis, for example,
found an ontological weight that its geometric models did not provide. Aït-Touati
draws from both cosmological treatises and fictions of travel and knowledge, as well
as personal correspondences, drawings, and instruments, to emphasize the multiple
borrowings between scientific and literary discourses. This volume sheds new light
on the practices of scientific invention, experimentation, and hypothesis formation
by situating them according to their fictional or factual tendencies.
