Spreading the news of scientific breakthroughs in the eighteenth century

Histories of Science shows how different forms of media communicated scientific breakthroughs during the long eighteenth century, bringing together eighteen humanities scholars to discuss the representation, reception, and application of natural philosophy in the Atlantic world. In particular, the authors focus on descriptions of scientific discoveries in popular print, with essays on topics as varied as placebo pills, irrigation systems, and navigational technology. And while each contributor advances a discrete argument, the collection coheres in its shared questions of methodology, historicity, and ethics. Histories of Science expands our record of the past, our understanding of the present, and our ability to imagine the future.Introduction / David Alff and Danielle Spratt

1. Science for the Birds: Figurative Language and The History of the Royal Society / Jess Keiser

2. Centlivre’s Frankenstein: Science, Authorship, and Monstrous (Re)Productions in A Bold Stroke for a Wife / Melissa Bailes

3. Picturing Air: The Rhetoric of Nondescription in Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-mechanical and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year / Vivian Zuluaga Papp

4. Romancing the Placebo / Jayne Lewis

5. The "eye of Mr. Anson himself": Art and Evanescence in A Voyage Round the World (1748) / Anne M. Thell

6. Literary Technologies of the Sextant in Eighteenth-Century Britain / Aaron R. Hanlon

7. "Newtonian Legacies in William Hogarth’s A Scene from The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards" / Laura Miller

8. "Fully Prov'd by the Plates": Desaguliers' Unauthorized System / Al Coppola

9. Plants, Principles, Strata: John Woodward's Improbably Corpuscles / Helen Thompson

10. "Mice in a Barn" or "Every Little Miss"?: Figurative Imagination and Demographic Narratives of the Long Eighteenth Century / Lisa Forman Cody

11. Jane Barker and Virgin Anatomy / Frank Boyle

12. Margaret Cavendish, a Sensitive Witness / Kristin M. Girten

13. Maria Edgeworth's Avian Entwinements: Experimental Science and the Cultivation of the Female Mind in Practical Education and Belinda / Adela Ramos

14. The Hoe and the Plow: Plantation Labor Under the Somatic Energy Regime / Ramesh Mallipeddi

15. Infrastructural Inversion at Clarens: St. Preux in the Garden / Eric Gidal

16. Taxonomic Subversion and Vegetal Expansion in Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head" / Anna K. Sagal

17. Spicy Forests and Amboyna Burl: Dryden and the Ecology of Disaster / Rajani Sudan

18. Geomythography: A Genealogy / Tobias MenelyDavid Alff is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and the author of The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region. Danielle Spratt is Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, and coauthor of Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice.This is a timely volume that makes a significant contribution to the field. Placing decolonial readings alongside Western histories of science, this essay collection traces an important new path in literature and science studies.?Rosalind Powell, University of Amsterdam, author of Perception and Analogy: Poetry, Science, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century