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

How might natural philosophy and the literary imagination have mutually informed, and even helped constitute each other in early modern Britain? While building on the seminal research of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (among others), Chico’s book pushes past the boundaries of their thought to present a more nuanced view of the ways in which the literary facilitated the articulation and transmission of early scientific identities, theories, practices, and findings. Her groundbreaking and remarkably innovative study makes it difficult to deny the critical and complex role played by literary knowledge in the evolution of experimental theory and praxis in particular in the long eighteenth century.

In stating her case, Chico makes every effort to be as transparent as possible, providing and defining keywords she feels are essential to proving that early modern natural philosophy is itself a type of “literary act.” Her gestures toward linguistic and conceptual clarity, which rely more on denotative precision than connotative play, reveal Chico’s own attempt to balance literary and scientific discursive practices in her study. She is also fully committed to adopting a feminist approach to her subject, successfully weaving women’s lives, works, and views (along with feminist methods) effortlessly into her monograph.

Chico begins by explaining that “experimental philosophy” requires literary figuration to exist, since it is necessary to describe the method, practices, and findings of scientists, as well as their distinct role as objective observers. In chapter 1, she focuses on how literary techniques are employed to make sense of two experimental technologies central to a “modern, enlightened” sensibility: “the observed particular and the modest witness.” Though she notes that early experimental philosophers initially tried to resist narrative and metaphor in their scientific writing, many (such as Robert Boyle) ultimately recognized it was a scientific tool that rendered elements of natural philosophy comprehensible and its practitioners credible.

In chapter 2, Chico considers how literary knowledge was also used to conceive of, figure, and critique the bad or deficient scientist, notably through the literary characters of the Gimcrack and the coquette, both “immodest witnesses” in experimental contexts. She claims that through these literary types, creative writers of the period queried the possibility of the unbiased scientific observer, suggesting that self-interest and self-delusion were always factors in the world of natural philosophy. Gimcracks, or immodest witnesses, appear to be the rule rather than the exception in such works as Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, where they are shown to undermine the socio-economic system on which modern life depends. While in some cases (such as Centlivre’s Valeria in The Basset-Table) self-interested experimental practice can grant a degree of agency and autonomy to characters in need of liberation, Chico concludes that such freedom ultimately proves transitory.

Chapter 3 offers a highly original reading of the discourse of scientific discovery, especially as expressed in dialogues, as a kind of seduction narrative, though of an intellectual rather than a bodily nature. To be tutored into the discipline of experimental philosophy, the would-be “modern, enlightened subject” must be enticed by it. Chico turns to a French scientific dialogue translated by Aphra Behn and an Italian one translated by Elizabeth Carter to establish the link between the seduction plot and scientific education, tracing the relation back to the works of Francis Bacon, who first figured “scientific practice as heteronormative, erotic quests.”

Chico moves from seduction to politics in chapter 4 by pondering how a community “seduced” by contemporary natural philosophy might structure itself socio-politically. She finds that Sprat, Cavendish, and Swift all make use of literary knowledge to either defend or critique the political systems or formations associated with experimental philosophy, given the mutually-enabling relationship of scientific thought and political practice. According to Chico, Sprat found in the manifesto a means to present the Royal Society as an “idealized civil sphere” worthy of imitation by the state and the “ideal experimentalist” as “the...