New science, new world
By: Denise Albanese.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
Subjects: Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642.; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.; Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626.; Donne, John, 1572-1631.; Milton, John, 1608-1674.; English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism.; Literature and science -- England -- History -- 17th century.; Geographical discoveries in literature.; Imperialism -- History -- 17th century.; Science -- History -- 17th century.; Imperialism in literature.; Science in literature.; America -- Discovery and exploration -- Historiography.; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 17th century.
Description: In New Science, New World Denise Albanese examines the discursive interconnections between two practices that emerged in the seventeenth century - modern science and colonialism.

Drawing on the discourse analysis of Foucault, the ideology-critique of Marxist cultural studies, and de Certeau's assertion that the modern world produces itself through alterity, she argues that the beginnings of colonialism are intertwined in complex fashion with the ways in which the literary became the exotic "other" and undervalued opposite of the scientific.

Albanese reads the inaugurators of the scientific revolution against the canonical authors of early modern literature, discussing Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems and Bacon's New Atlantis as well as Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

She examines how the newness or "novelty" of investigating nature is expressed through representations of the New World, including the native, the feminine, the body, and the heavens. "New" is therefore shown to be a double sign, referring both to the excitement associated with a knowledge oriented away from past practices, and to the oppression and domination typical of the colonialist enterprise.

Exploring the connections between the New World and the New Science, and the simultaneously emerging patterns of thought and forms of writing characteristic of modernity, Albanese insists that science is at its inception a form of power-knowledge, and that the modern and postmodern division of "Two Cultures," the literary and the scientific, has its antecedents in the early modern world.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-238) and index.