The Art of Discovery

This anthology brings together scholars from literature, the natural sciences, and the philosophy of science, to present new perspectives on the relations between literary and scientific communities. Drawing on literature spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as Europe and the Americas, the authors explore how science has been portrayed from the perspective of literature at different times and in different places - as challenge or opportunity, promise or scandal. The disturbance of science emanates perhaps from its association with a frightening future or its ability to change the appearance of the past; the scandal occurs as it recalls us to thresholds and hybrids: human and non-human, animal and machine. Science, however, also emerges as a source of metaphor and imaginative modelling, of encodings and decodings, representations and discoveries. Less prominent in the collection, though no less important, is the view on how scientific cultures portray literature or the literary academic, and how science reflects on itself.