Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof

Slater, Michael

Paperback

Series: Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismSports General

ISBN10: 1032422998
ISBN13: 9781032422992
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Sep 29 2025
Pages: 222
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the scientific revolution inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory--a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance--became the vice of those times, as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Also from

Slater, Michael

View All

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All