Experimental Science and the Art of the Novel

The coincident birth of experimental science and the early English novel is followed to its underlying rationale of mimesis—the construction of small, abstracted worlds in which possibilities and constraints play out and which teach us about the wider world. The second mode of imagination is the textual. The entangled story of the textual in literature and science is followed though Newton and Milton, Boyle and Defoe, Humboldt and Emerson, and a parallel reading of Henry James’ The Art of the Novel and William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation. Late-modern comparisons are made between Feynman’s Nobel Prize account, and the writing of Nabokov and Woolf, finding that textual imagination still displays common creative patterns in science and literature.