The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment by Tita Chico (review)

Recent studies in the field of literature and science have begun to revise a long-standing model of mutual influence towards one of mutual constitution. The historicist and interdisciplinary work of much eighteenth-century scholarship has helped to unearth unexpected interconnections between literature and science, too often presumed to be separate enterprises: shared rhetorical strategies, epistemological structures, and circulating networks. Rather than anachronistically presuming the coherence and stability of the categories "literature" and "science," The Experimental Imagination inhabits a "context that is in flux" where both domains are entangled in processes of becoming (9). This critical strategy of "acknowledg[ing] the peculiarity between then and now" and "hold[ing] that peculiarity as simultaneously disorienting and illustrative" yields for Tita Chico the key framework for her book: the "experimental imagination" captures the intellectual and aesthetic qualities of scientific inquiry that was beginning to define itself by and against literary knowledge (9). For Chico more polemically, science itself was "a form of figuration, a kind of literary act" (5).

Chico traces how natural philosophy depended on the "imaginative impulses available within a literary framework" to produce its objects of inquiry and the subjects capable of engaging with them—"modest witnesses" who could carefully martial the imagination towards rational, scientific ends (10). Through a mobile set of tropes, natural philosophers constructed their own authority by imagining new forms of evidence, learning, and observation. Crucial to this act of self-legitimacy is the deep reliance on literature's speculative capacities to realize what is under the microscope, as in the case of Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665). To "experiment" was necessarily to engage in metaphoric thinking that then provided the vocabulary for representing and making sense of natural phenomena. This reframing of science as an epistemological endeavour that was deeply dependent on sustained imaginative, literary acts is one of The Experimental Imagination's most "radical revelations" (13).

Emblematic of the book's method of refusing the "teleology that sees science as a winner of history and literature as its debased sibling, scampering to catch up" is its extensive archive of literary and scientific texts ranging from translations of scientific dialogues to Restoration drama. The fluidity with which Chico connects seemingly disparate elements from scientific treatises and novels, for instance, works to challenge our assumptions about how we might define the "literary" or the "scientific" in each case. Literature served as a persistent reminder of the sociality of science as a set of discourses and practices—its enmeshment within a web of social relations. From the perspective of method, Chico powerfully models how literary texts are central to understanding the history of science despite the field's historical resistance to the literary. We simultaneously encounter the literary qualities of science and scientific qualities of literature. This is particularly evident in her provocative arguments about the antitheses of the "modest witnesses" of the Royal Society. As figures of "immodest" failure and "bad science," the gimcrack and the coquette reveal the performative nature of natural philosophy: well into the nineteenth century, for example, public science was characterized by dramatic visual spectacles. Such examples raise provocative questions about the roles of other "immodest" figures in the eighteenth century like the "idiot" incapable of becoming a reasoning, modest witness or the quack doctor who is dissembling similarly to the gimcrack.

Another critical intervention made by The Experimental Imagination is Chico's theorizing of how affect operates in the eighteenth-century culture of experiment. As much as scientists wanted to portray themselves as figures of reason, underpinning that reason was desire and feeling. In Chico's understanding, feeling is a form of scientific epistemology despite its disavowal. The ubiquity of the gimcrack and the coquette throughout eighteenth-century literature underscores the pervasive cultural anxiety around scientific desire and object choice gone wrong—when modesty becomes wholly immodest as in James Miller's The Humours of Science (1726) or Susanna Centlivre's...