Empiricist Devotions
Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Virginia Press
Published:30th Apr '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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
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
ISBN: 9780813938387
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 518g
288 pages