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This book is about experimental imagination in the British Enlightenment. It tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds. Early scientists used metaphor to define the phenomena they studied. They likewise used metaphor to imagine themselves into their roles as experimentalists. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British literature includes countless references to early science to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge, whose truths challenge the dominant account of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non epistemological innovation of the long eighteenth century. The Experimental Imagination considers traditional scientific writings alongside poems, plays, and prose works by canonical and non-canonical authors to argue that ideas about science facilitated new forms of evidence and authority. The noisy satiric rancor and quiet concern that science generated among science advocates, dramatists, essayists, and poets reveal a doubled epistemological trajectory: experimental observation utilizes imaginative speculation and imaginative fancy enables new forms of understanding. Early scientific practice requires yet often obscures that imaginative impulse, which literary knowledge embraces as a way of understanding the world at large. Reciprocally, the period’s theory of aesthetics arises from the observational protocols of science, ultimately laying claim to literature as epistemologically superior. Early science finds its intellectual and conceptual footing in the metaphoric thinking available through literary knowledge, and literary writers wield science as a trope for the importance and unique insights of literary knowledge.

Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called “the novel” that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. The author of this book makes an intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, the book revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. It demonstrates just how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of “artificial life”—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.

Sentimental Memorials explores how popular women writers used the art form of the novel to record their changing relations to literary history. At the end of the eighteenth century, as sentimental fiction slipped out of emerging conceptions of literary value, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson reflected on what changes in literature’s meaning and status would mean for their own works and legacies. Their novels provide a means of understanding how women novelists clarified, protested, and finally memorialized the historical conditions under which they wrote. Calling for a new understanding of sentimental fiction as a self-historicizing and highly self-conscious genre, Sentimental Memorials sheds new light on sentimental novels, on female authorship, and on the history of the transformations reshaping literature at the end of the eighteenth century.