Title Fictional matter : empiricism, corpuscles, and the novel / Helen Thompson

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] ©2017

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Description 1 online resource (359 pages) : illustrations Contents Boyle's doctrine of qualities -- John Locke and matter's power -- Morbific matter and character's form -- Race and the corpuscle -- Quality's qualities: fielding alchemical imaginary -- Fixing sex: Richardson's Clarissa -- Denominating oxygen Summary In a groundbreaking study of the ralationship between chemistry and literary history, Helen Thompson explores the ways in which chemical conceptions of matter shaped eighteenth-century British culture. Although the scientific revolution championed experimental, sense-based knowledge, chemists claimed that perceptible bodies were made of invisible particles or "corpuscles." Neither modern elements nor classical atoms, corpuscles were reactive, divisible units of matter. Imperceptible but real, the corpuscle transformed empirical knowledge in early modern science and the novel. Thompson offers new analyses of the chemistry, alchemy, color theory, physiology, environmental science, and medicine pioneered by Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hales, John Mitchell, John Arbuthnot, and Thomas Sydenham to argue that they shaped cultural conceptions of racial, class, sex, and species identity. Juxtaposing science with readings of novels by Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, William Rufus Chetwood, and Penelope Aubin, she shows how, at the level of form as well as character, novels represent perceptual knowledge that refers not to innate essence but to dynamic and unstable relations. The narrative mode that experimental science bequeaths to literary history, Fictional Matter argues, does not transparently mirror perceptible objects. Instead, novels represent the forms and relations through which imperceptible particles stimulate sensory experience. In this lucid, revisionary analysis of corpuscular chemistry, Thompson advances a new account of the influence of experimental science and empirical knowledge on the emergent realist novel Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (JSTOR, viewed March 26, 2019) Subject English fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism Chemistry -- England -- History -- 18th century Literature and science -- England -- History -- 18th century Empiricism in literature. Chemistry in literature. Science -- England -- History -- 18th century BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Science Literature and science Empiricism in literature Chemistry in literature Chemistry English fiction England Genre/Form History Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 0812293533 9780812293531

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