The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science - A Disciplinary History of American Writing

In this major new book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have written in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--three highly articulate and alarmed witnesses to the great crisis in modern intellectual history, the professionalization of science. It was, Limon argues, especially difficult for American writers to face this crisis because, since America had been born in an age of expanding scientific consciousness and thus no appeal could be made to traditional, pre-scientific values.

List of contents

1. Toward a disciplinary intellectual history; 2. Brown's epistemology; 3. Poe's methodology; 4. Hawthorne's technology; 5. After the revolutions: Brown and Dreiser, Poe and Pynchon, Hawthorne and Mailer.

Summary

In this 1990 book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Product details

• Authors: John Limon
• Assisted by: Albert Gelpi (Editor), Ross Posnock (Editor)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.07.2012
• EAN: 9780521352512
• ISBN: 978-0-521-35251-2
• No. of pages: 234
• Dimensions: 157 mm x 235 mm x 18 mm
• Weight: 537 g
• Series: Cambridge Studies in American
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies