Swift and Science

It is thought that Swift was opposed to the new science that heralded the beginning of the modern age, but this book interrogates that assumption, tracing the theological, political, and socio-cultural resonances of scientific knowledge in the early eighteenth century, and considering what they can reveal about Swift's imagination.

Autorentext
GREGORY LYNALL is lecturer in the School of English at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has published widely on the relationship between literature, science and alchemy in the long eighteenth century, and worked as a research assistant on A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh, for the Cambridge Edition of Jonathan Swift.

Inhalt
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Altitudes of Authority Meditations and Mechanisms: Swift and Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects Sinking the 'Spider's Cittadel': The Battel of the Books and Thomas Burnet's 'Philosophical Romance' of the Earth Newtonian Battels with Rising Stars and Wheeling Moons Laputian Newtons: Science, the Wood's Halfpence Affair and Gulliver's Travels Socinians and Queens: Samuel Clarke and 'Directions for a Birthday Song' Afterword Notes Bibliography Index