The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.

Few critical terms coined by poets are more famous than “negative capability.” Though Keats uses the mysterious term only once, a consensus about its meaning has taken shape over the last two centuries. Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives offers alternative ways to approach and understand Keats’s seductive term.

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

Sir Isaac Newton’s publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Concepts such as attraction and extrapolation—detailed in his landmark monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—found their way into both scientific and cultural discourse. Understanding the trajectory of Newton’s diverse critical and popular reception in print demands consideration of how his ideas were disseminated in a marketplace comprised of readers with varying levels of interest and expertise. Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading. Informed by sustained archival work and multiple critical approaches, Laura Miller asserts that print facilitated the mainstreaming of Newton's ideas. In addition to his reading habits and his manipulation of print conventions in the Principia, Miller analyzes the implied readership of various "popularizations" as well as readers traced through the New York Society Library's borrowing records. Many of the works considered—including encyclopedias, poems, and a work written "for the ladies"—are not scientifically innovative but are essential to eighteenth-century readers’ engagement with Newtonian ideas. Revising the timeline in which Newton’s scientific ideas entered eighteenth-century culture, Reading Popular Newtonianism is the first book to interrogate at length the importance of print to his consequential career.

This book offers a new account of the relationship between empiricism and the essay in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Exploring topics such as trust, testimony, virtue, and language, it offers new perspectives on connections between philosophy and literature, empiricism and transcendentalism, and Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Literary Attention: An fMRI Study of Reading Jane Austen

Explores the developing cultural tensions and connections that created a 'sister-art' movement between creative visual art and its literary counterparts.

The essays in this edited collection look at the role of poetry in the development of Enlightenment ideas. As scholarly disciplines began to emerge – anthropology, linguistics, psychology – the ancient art of poetry was invoked to create new ways of defining and expanding this philosophy of human science.

Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors’ interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.