1st Edition
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution Forms of Proof
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A “Literary-Scientific Revolution?”
Chapter 1 – A New Concept of Motion: Allegory and the “Literary Revolution”
Chapter 2 – A Poetics of “Transfixion”: Dissecting Allegory in The Faerie Queene
Chapter 3 – Rethinking “Revolution”: Hamlet’s Astronomical Metaphors
Chapter 4 – The Ghost in the Machine: “Emotion” and Mind-Body Union from Hamlet to
Descartes
Chapter 5 – Reading the “Book of Nature”: Allegory and Astronomy in Galileo and Kepler
Index
Biography
Michael Slater is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Liberal and Integrative Studies at SUNY Brockport, USA, where he works on Renaissance drama, the intersections between literature and the history of science, and allegory. He has published articles on, among other texts, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, Othello, The Changeling, and Paradise Lost.
C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures” lamented the modern divide between the sciences and the humanities. In this new book, Slater (SUNY Brockport) demonstrates that, in the 17th century, these two were intimately connected. In science, the Aristotelean animistic world view was being supplanted by a mechanistic one. For Aristotle, a rock falls because it seeks its natural place at the center of the earth. For modern science, a rock falls because external forces act on it. Slater maintains that removing volition from inanimate objects led to the rejection of allegory. Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595) champions allegory. By 1678, when John Bunyan published The Pilgrim’s Progress, he felt obliged to apologize for it. In a fascinating chapter on Hamlet and astronomy, Slater notes how the play draws on both Copernican and Ptolemaic cosmologies: Hamlet embraces the new science, Claudius and Polonius the old. Ptolemy’s first name was also Claudius. Yet as Slater shows, even scientists in the 17th century did not completely eschew allegory. Galileo argued that, if the Bible is read allegorically, it would not conflict with his observations. Altogether an illuminating work.
--J. Rosenblum, formerly, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
