Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727

K. Gevirtz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137386762
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book shows how early women novelists from Aphra Behn to Mary Davys drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre. Fascinated by the problematic idea of a unified self underpinning modes of thinking, female novelists innovated narrative structures to interrogate this idea.

Notes

Introduction

1. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). See also Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

2. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

3. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self; Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH 64, no. 2 (1997): 457, doi:10.1353/elh.1997.0017; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, paperback ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

4. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, xii.

5. See, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Including and Translation of Thomas Hobbes, “Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris,” by Simon Shaffer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1995); Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Judith P. Zinsser, ed., Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton, Introduction to Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997), 1–6.

6. See, for example, Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump; Shapin, Social History; Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy; Dear, Discipline and Experience; Peter Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56, no. 4 (October 1995): 531–53, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709991; Peter Dear, “Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76, no. 2 (June 1985): 149–61; Geoffrey Gorham, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Harvey-Descartes Controversy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 2 (April 1994): 211–34, doi:10.2307/2709897; Barbara M. Benedict, “The Mad Scientist: The Creation of a Literary Stereotype,” in Imagining the Sciences: Expressions of New Knowledge in the “Long” Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert C. Leitz, III and Kevin L. Cope (New York: AMS Press, 2004), 68–70; Elizabeth Potter, Gender and Boyle’s Law of Gases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 107; Keller, “Producing Petty Gods”; Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007); Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1929 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013).

7. Michael Hunter, “The Making of Christopher Wren,” in Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy, 49.

8. This narrative of self and epistemology follows the opposite course traced by Loraine Daston and Peter Galison in Objectivity. They argue that scientific methodology created a sense of self, particularly a scientific self. I do not dispute that epistemology may have generated a scientific self—one investigated not only by Daston and Galison but also, for example, by Jan Golinski in his work on Humphy Davy—but I do suggest that the epistemology whose influence they are tracking itself had its origins in something beyond itself. Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

9. Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish, 107. See also Keller, “Producing Petty Gods.”

10. Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6.

11. George S. Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre- And Post-Modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), 284, 294; Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). See also Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 18; Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 2004); Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

12. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

13. Carnell, Partisan Politics; Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

14. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• One   Notions of the Self
• Two   An Ingenious Romance: The Stable Self
• Three   The Fly’s Eye: The Composite Self
• Four   The Detached Observer
• Five   The Moral Observer
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index