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.

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 explores what literate British people understood by the word 'Europe' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Was Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where were the edges of Europe? Was Europe primarily a commercial network or were there common political practices too? Was Britain itself a European country? While intellectual history is concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers, Paul Stock traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts, offering a detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, which were widely read by literate Britons of all classes, and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain: ideas about religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the 'centre' and 'edges' of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change. By showing how these and other questions were discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 provides a thorough and much-needed historical analysis of Britain's enduringly complex intellectual relationship with Europe.

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.