Synopses & Reviews
Literate Experience argues for the existence of certain shared patterns of intellectual association in the English seventeenth century, patterns that follow the outlines of Bacon’s project of epistemological reform. Bacon’s project offered a theory of how knowing as a private act could be transformed into a public one, an act related to the creation and maintenance of public authority. The question thus becomes, how did thinkers in the period reimagine civil society as a polity of knowledge? This study traces out a variety of answers to that question, ranging from the Royal Society’s communal rhetoric to the work of four literary writers who, in a variety of ways, problematize the notion that political society exists as a community of shared knowledge.
About the Author
Andrew Barnaby is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. His previously published work includes articles on Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell.
Lisa J. Schnell is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her previously published work includes articles on Aemelia Lanyer, Rachel Speght and Aphra Behn.
Table of Contents
Anatomy Lessons: Experimental Discourse and the Beginnings of the Public Sphere (Bacon to Locke) * “A Comune Beholdyng Place”: The Scene of Knowledge in
Measure for Measure * “So great a diffrence is there in degree”: Aemelia Lanyer and the Critique of Aristocratic Privilege * Affecting the Metaphysics: Andrew Marvell's Discourse of Love and the Trials of Public Speech at Midcentury * “Matter of Fact”: Truth, Evidence and Discourse in the Late Prose of Aphra Behn
Anatomy Lessons: Experimental Discourse and the Beginnings of the Public Sphere (Bacon to Locke) * “A Comune Beholdyng Place”: The Scene of Knowledge in Measure for Measure * “So great a diffrence is there in degree”: Aemelia Lanyer and the Critique of Aristocratic Privilege * Affecting the Metaphysics: Andrew Marvell's Discourse of Love and the Trials of Public Speech at Midcentury * “Matter of Fact”: Truth, Evidence and Discourse in the Late Prose of Aphra Behn