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Book Information

Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-5261-5704-1
Pages: 296
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Price: £80.00
Published Date: October 2021
BIC Category: Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 18th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literature & literary studies / Literature: history & criticism, Mathematics & science / History of science, Literature & literary studies / Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800

Description

Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.

Introduction
1. Celestial speculations
2. Light, perception and revelation
3. Seeing in colour
4. Understanding the eye
5. Perception and the body
Bibliography
Notes
Index