Description
Book SynopsisLocating literature at the intersection of distinct areas of thinking on the nature, scope and methods of knowledge - philosophy, theology, science, and the law - this book engages with literary texts across periods and genres to address questions of probability, problems of evidence, the uses of experiment and the poetics and ethics of doubt.
Trade Review“All the essays provide a complex but readable text, backed by massive scholarship, meticulously documented in the notes at their end. … the essays in Fictions of Knowledge offer rich and complex investigations of the fascinating world of knowledge in its varied manifestations in literary and non-literary texts, and should be of interest to all who are interested in meaningful connections between the two.” (Tej N. Dhar, The European Legacy, Vol. 20 (1), October, 2015)
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; Y.Batsaki, S.Mukherji & J.M.Schramm Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Evolution of a Concept; B.Shapiro Providence, Experience and Doubt in Medieval England; C.Watkins Law, Probability and Character in Shakespeare; L.Hutson Trying, Knowing and Believing: Epistemic Plots and the Poetics of Doubt; S.Mukherji The Anxiety of Variety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton and Bacon; K.Murphy Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment; J.Bender Lost in the Castle of Scepticism: Sceptical Philosophy as Gothic Romance; S.Kareem From Alchemy to Experiment: The Political Economy of Experience in William Godwin's St Leon: A Tale of The Sixteenth Century; Y.Batsaki Towards a Poetics of (Wrongful) Accusation: Innocence and Working-Class Voice in Mid-Victorian Fiction; J.M.Schramm Afterword; M.Wood Bibliography Index
