ENGL 3720 - Literature, Science, and Technology: The Curious Art of Science - Aulakh

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Ryan King
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The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift

The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift is a specially commissioned collection of essays. Arranged thematically across a range of topics, this 2003 volume will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Jonathan Swift for students and scholars. The thirteen essays explore crucial dimensions of Swift's life and works. As well as ensuring a broad coverage of Swift's writing - including early and later works as well as the better known and the lesser known - the Companion also offers a way into current critical and theoretical issues surrounding the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift's vexed relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland; and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicised age. The Companion offers a lucid introduction to these and other issues, and raises questions about Swift and his world. The volume features a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading.

Portrait of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle by Louis Galloche, 1723

Portrait of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle by Louis Galloche, 1723

Attribution: Louis Galloche, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish

As a reader of her literary predecessors, and as a writer who herself contributed to the emerging literary tradition, Margaret Cavendish is an extraordinary figure whose role in early modern literary history has yet to be fully acknowledged. In this study, Lara Dodds reassesses the literary invention of Cavendish--the use she makes of other writers, her own various forms of writing, and the ways in which she creates her own literary persona--to transform our understanding of Cavendish's considerable accomplishments and influence. In spite of Cavendish's claims that she did little reading whatsoever, Dodds demonstrates that the duchess was an agile, avid reader (and misreader) of other writers, all of them male, all of them now considered canonical--Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Bacon. In each chapter, Dodds discusses Cavendish's moments of reading of these authors, revealing their influence on Cavendish while also providing a lens to investigate more broadly the many literary forms--poetry, letters, fiction, drama--that Cavendish employed. Seeking a fruitful exchange between literary history and the history of reading, Dodds examines both the material and social circumstances of reading and the characteristic formal features and thematic preoccupations of Cavendish's writing in each of the major genres. 

Portrait: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle by Peter Lely, 1665

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle by Peter Lely, 1665

Attribution: Peter Lely, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Galileo's Thinking Hand

Contemporary biographies of Galilei emphasize, in several places, that he was a masterful draughtsman. In fact, Galilei studied at the art academy, which is where his friendship with Ludovico Cigoli developed, who later became the official court artist. The book focuses on this formative effect - it tracks Galilei's trust in the epistemological strength of drawings. It also looks at Galilei's activities in the world of art and his reflections on art theory, ending with an appreciation of his fame; after all, he was revered as a rebirth of Michelangelo. For the first time, this publication collects all aspects of the appreciation of Galilei as an artist, contemplating his art not only as another facet of his activities, but as an essential element of his research.

Galileo shows the Medicean planets to the Allegories of Optics, Astronomy and Mathematics, 1656

Galileo shows the Medicean planets (Galilean moons) to the Allegories of Optics, Astronomy and Mathematics, 1656

Attribution: Opere by Galileo Galilei, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Ebook: Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History

Ebook: Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History

In her view, these early modern utopian constructions of history relate very closely to and impinge upon the narrative structures of history assumed by critical theory today.