Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Contents -- Introduction / Jorge Bastos da Silva and Miguel Ramalhete Gomes -- Forethought: A Trade for Light and the State of the Art / George Rousseau -- Engendering Space, Creating Meaning -- Oroonoko and the Mapping of Africa / Bernhard Klein -- The Early Modern Couch: Richard Brome’s The Antipodes as Freudian Material / Miguel Ramalhete Gomes -- A World of One’s Own: Margaret Cavendish and the Science of Self-fashioning / Kate De Rycker -- The Arts Meet the Sciences in Exploring the Continent: Some Grand Tour Imagology / Mihaela Irimia -- Forms of Discourse and Sociability -- From Inventio to Invention: John Wilkins’ Mathematical Magick / Maria Avxentevskaya -- “Quitting Now the Flowers of Rhetoric”: Anti-rhetorical Continuities in English Science and Literature / Richard Nate -- Reconnoitring and Recognizing: Modes of Knowledge in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks / Jorge Bastos da Silva -- Readers of Nerves and Tears: From Plague to Pamela / Daniel Essig García -- Quackery, “Chymistry” and Politics in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction / Wojciech Nowicki.

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This volume highlights the connections that link both literary discourse and the discourse about literature to the conceptual or representational frameworks, practices, and cognitive results (the ‘truths’) of disciplines such as psychology, medicine, epistemology, anthropology, cartography, chemistry, and rhetoric. Literature and the sciences, embedded as they are in specific historical circumstances, thus emerge as fields of inquiry and representation which share a number of assumptions and are determined or constructed by several modes of cross-fertilization. The range of authors examined includes Richard Brome, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Shaftesbury, Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Smollett, while emphasis is placed on how authors of literature regard the practices, practitioners and findings of science, as well as on how ‘mimesis’ intersects with scientific discourse. Contributors are Bernhard Klein, Daniel Essig García, George Rousseau, Jorge Bastos da Silva, Kate De Rycker, Maria Avxentevskaya, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, Mihaela Irimia, Richard Nate, and Wojciech Nowicki.