The Voice of the Non-Human: Scientific Knowledge, It-Narratives and Fiction in the Long Eighteenth Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2037-2426/20781Parole chiave:
It-Narrative , Scienza , Settecento , Non-Umano , Letteratura IngleseAbstract
This article examines the connection between early scientific ideas and It-Narratives in Britain over the long eighteenth century. A set of It-Narratives - fictional texts narrated by, or centred on, non-human entities like things or animals - will be read against the attempt to detect the voice of natural things by a number of early-modern experimental and natural philosophers. It will be argued that, although causal links are hard to prove, there is a degree of epistemic vicinity between these early scientific ideas and It-Narratives. In particular, it will be shown how in both disciplines fiction helped contemplate the possibility that non-human knowledge is more reliable than human-derived one.
Riferimenti bibliografici
Achinstein, Peter. “Newton’s Corpuscular Query.” Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science, edited by Phillip
Bricker and R. I. G. Hughes, The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 135–174.
Adams Day, Robert. “Introduction.” Tobias Smollett, History and Adventures of an Atom, edited by Robert Adams Day, University of Georgia Press, 2014, pp. xxv–lxxvi.
Alber, Jan. “What Commodities Have to Say about Consumerism: The Eighteenth-Century Novel ‘The Adventures of a Black Coat’.” Material Culture, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55–66.
Anon., Memoirs and Adventures of a Flea; in which are Interspersed Many Humorous Characters and Anecdotes. T. Axtell, 1785.
Anon., The Adventures of a Pin, Supposed to be Related by Himself, Herself, or Itself. 1790.
Anon., The Adventures of a Watch!. G. Kearsley, 1788.
Appadurai, Arjin. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 3–63.
Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning, edited by William Wright, Oxford University Press, 1920.
Bechler, Zev. “Newton’s 1672 Optical Controversies: A Study in the Grammar of Scientific Dissent.” The Interaction Between Science and Philosophy, edited by Yehuda Elkana and Samuel Sambursky, Humanities Press, 1974, pp. 115–142.
Bellamy, Liz. “It-Narrators and Circulation.” The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, Bucknell University Press, 2007, pp. 117–146.
Benedict, Barbara M. “The Spirit of Things.” The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, Bucknell University Press, 2007, pp. 19–42.
Benedict, Barbara M. “Encounters with the Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Early Eighteenth-Century Thing-Poem.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2007, pp. 193–207.
Bernaerts, Lars, Caracciolo, Marco, Herman, Luc, and Vervaeck, Bar. “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators.” Narrative, vol. 22, no. 1, 2014, pp. 68–93.
Blackwell, Mark. “The It-Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Animals and Objects in Circulation.” Literature Compass, vol. 1, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–5.
Boyle, Robert. A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things. H.C., 1688.
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago University Press, 2003.
Burström, Nanouschka. “Things in the Eye of the Beholder: A Humanistic Perspective on Archaeological Object Biographies.” Norwegian Archaeological Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 2014, pp. 65–82.
Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Cornell University Press, 1999.
Coppola, Al. The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Coventry, Francis. The History of Pompey the Little. Or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog. M. Cooper, 1751.
Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Zone Books, 2004.
Daston, Lorraine. “Introduction.” Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, edited by Lorraine Daston, Zone Books, 2004, pp. 9–24.
Dixon, Sarah. Poems on Several Occasions. J. Abree, 1740.
Douglas, Aileen. “Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 6 (1993), 65–82
Downie, James Alan. “The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Oxford University Press, 2016.
Festa, Lynn. “The Lives of Things: Objects, It-Narratives, and Fictional Autobiography, 1700–1800.” A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 133–147.
Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Flint, Christopher. The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de. An Account of the Life and Writings of Sr. Isaac Newton. T. Warner, 1727.
Freedgood, Elaine. “What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2010, pp. 83–100.
Gildon, Charles. The Golden Spy; Or, a Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments of War and Peace, and Love and Politics. J. Woodward and J. Morphew, 1709.
Green, Mitchell. “Narrative Fiction as a Source of Knowledge.” Narration as Argument, edited by Paula Olmos, Springer, 2017, pp. 47–61.
Hamilakis, Yannis. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.Femaleman-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, 2018.
Howell, A. C. “Res et Verba: Words and Things.” ELH, vol. 13, no. 2, 1946, pp. 131–142.
Howgill, Francis. The Invisible Things of God. Thomas Simmons, 1659.
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by J.B. Scheenewind, Hackett Publishing Company, 1983.
Hunter, Michael. “The Royal Society and the Origins of British Archaeology: II.” Antiquity, vol. 45, no. 1, 1971, pp. 187–192.
Ivana, Dragoş. “Merging the Human and the Nonhuman: The Object Narrator in The Adventures of a Black Coat.” Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 148–159.
Jones, Catherine. “Tobias Smollett, Travel Writing, and Medical Botany.” The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture, edited by Ralph McLean, Ralph, Ronnie Young, and Kenneth Simpson, Bucknell University Press, 2016, pp. 53–76.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press, 2013.
Knellwolf King, Christa. “A History of Inanimate Minds.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 55, no. 4, 2014, pp. 451–453.
Kramnick, Jonathan. Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson. Stanford University Press, 2010.
Lake, Crystal B. “Feeling Things: The Novel Objectives of Sentimental Objects.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 183–193.
Lamb, Jonathan. “Locke’s Wild Fancies: Empiricism, Personhood, and Fictionality.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 48, no. 3, 2007, pp. 187–204.
Lamb, Jonathan. The Things Things Say. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Lewis, Rhodri. Language Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Lupton, Christina. “The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 39, no. 1, 2006, pp. 402–420.
Lupton, Christina. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Lynch, Deidre. “Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 12, no. 2, 2000, pp. 345–368.
MacLaurin, Colin. An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries. J. Nourse, 1748.
Mann, Annika. “Waste Management: Tobias Smollett and Remediation.” Eighteenth‐Century Fiction, vol. 25, no. 2, 2012, pp. 359–382.
Mattana, Alessio. “The Modest Genius: Mathematics, Certainty, and the Creation of the Public Newton.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 47, no. 3, 2023, pp. 30–62.
Mulhall, Anne. “Gulliver’s Travels and the Language Debates of Swift’s Time.” Les voyages de Gulliver: Mondes lointains ou mondes proches. Presses universitaires de Caen, 2002.
Newton, Isaac. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, edited and translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, California University Press, 1999.
Newton, Isaac. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Royal Society, 1713.
Park, Julie. The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England. Stanford University Press, 2010.
Pemberton, Henry. A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy. S. Palmer, 1728.
Pennington, Isaac the younger. Divine Essays; or Considerations about Several Things in Religion. John Macock, 1654.
Philips, Edward. The Adventures of a Black Coat Containing a Series of Remarkable Occurrences and Entertaining Incidents . . . As Related by Itself. Alex M. Caslan, 1750.
Phillips, Eli M. “‘All the Litter As It Lay’: Swift, Montagu, and Their Practice of Thing Theory.” Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 14, no. 2, 2021, pp. 16–25.
Plot, Robert. The Natural History of Oxfordshire. Theatre of Oxford, 1677.
Plot, Robert. The Natural History of Staffordshire. Theatre of Oxford, 1686.
Rodrigues, Patricia. “Gildon’s Golden Spies: Or, Minting Remarks on Modern Societies.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, vol. 79, no. 1, 2019, pp. 103–122.
Shapin, Steven, and Schaffer, Simon. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton University Press, 1985.
Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Smollett, Tobias. History and Adventures of an Atom, edited by Robert Adams Day, University of Georgia Press, 2014.
Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. T. R., 1667.
Stark, Ryan J. “Language Reform in the Late Seventeenth Century.” Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society: A Sourcebook, edited by Tina Skouen and Ryan J. Stark, Brill, 2015, pp. 94–127.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Claude Rawson, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Tiffany, Daniel. “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity.” Critical Enquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 72–98.
Todd, Dennis. “Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science.” Studies in Philology, vol. 75, no. 1, 1978, pp. 93–120.
Vickers, Brian. “Francis Bacon and the Progress of Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, no. 3, 1992, pp. 495–518.
Wall, Cynthia S. The Prose of Things: Transformations and Description in the Eighteenth Century. The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Walmsley, Peter. “The Enlightenment Worker: An Introduction.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 23, no. 2, 2011, pp. 258–268.
Wilkins, John. Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. A. Maxwell, 1675.
Dowloads
Pubblicato
Come citare
Fascicolo
Sezione
Licenza
Except where otherwise noted, the content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License.
Accettato 2024-03-01
Pubblicato 2024-03-02
