| Literary and Scientific Revolutions aims to demonstrate, above all, that historical changes in early modernity we now tend to think of as predominately scientific in nature had implications for, and were implicated by, changes in literary structure. It argues that the "Scientific Revolution" in the seventeenth century simultaneously entailed a "literary revolution," a profound reorientation of the aesthetic modes that dominated early modern culture. In addition to widespread contest over the legitimacy of specific tropes and figures---from personification to metaphor to anamorphosis---this reorientation included as one of its clearest manifestations an intense devaluation of narrative allegory. Whereas allegory served for many in the Renaissance as the broadest justification for literature, by the end of the period it was more often depicted as "the vice of those times," as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This project reveals how such drastic changes in literary ideals were possible only in conjunction with revised concepts of motion, and how these revised concepts were themselves, at least partly, products of a debate about the value of literary figures. In short, it shows that the scientific revolution was literary, and the literary revolution scientific. |
