Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

英国和德国的科学诗歌和诗学，从文艺复兴到启蒙运动

• 批准号: AH/Y007530/1
• 负责人: Kevin Killeen
• 金额: $ 44.7万
• 依托单位: University of York
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY007530%2F1
• 关键词: Scientific; Poetry; Poetics; Britain; Germany

Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the EnlightenmentThis project explores a mass of largely-unknown scientific poetry, ranging across sciences such as geology, astronomy and botany, and a corresponding poetics of science, an imaginative-aesthetic quality to the emerging disciplines. It will reveal a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of new ideas, but new forms and vocabularies in which to think through those ideas. This poetic writing did not serve as an equivalent of prose, or a mere popularisation of 'real' science, but positively understood its practice to address nuances of the world, physical and metaphysical, that prose could not plumb. Poetry, the era believed, did not function as mere ornament, but to reveal deep structures in the created world. This potential was theorised by the period's emerging literary criticism, a practice that developed in, the research will show, demonstrable parallel with modern science. The project will unearth and analyse a body of work by women, much of it still in manuscript, that deploys its theo-scientific ideas to dazzling effect, as well as a mass of Neo-Latin verse on topics ranging from blood transfusion to flight theory. It will also show the diffusion of this phenomenal body of scientific literature and its agile poetics, whose influence can be seen in a set of networks operating across Northern Europe - in Latin and German as well as English, and it will trace how a long history of didactic scientific verse morphs and mutates with particularly dramatic effects in the late 17th and early 18th century. The research addresses lacunae in both English and German scholarship. While recent work has addressed the rhetorical character of early modern science, it has focused almost exclusively on prose writing, often of a later period, by male writers, in the vernaculars. This research will show how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, poetic writing was not only central to communicating natural philosophical knowledge, but how shared imaginative processes were thought to inform both domains. One consequence of this blind spot in the scholarship has been a thoroughgoing neglect of a significant English-German poeto-scientific transfer in the early European Enlightenment. The project's reformulation of the era's poetic ideas - its cosmopoetics, its theopoetics and its physico-theology - bears on how we understand emergent aesthetics in this most tumultuous period for the vernaculars of both England and Germany. It will also reveal a good deal about the compositional and referential density of both scientific knowledge and poetic forms, writing that came to be valued precisely because of its discursive volatility and its kaleidoscopic capacity. The project opens up Anglo-German perspectives on the European res publica litteraria that have not been studied, and via its exploration of respective textual corpora and archival finds, the cooperation promises to reveal connections and otherwise hidden parallels in disciplines that have come to be understood, in debates on the 'two cultures' of science and humanities, as antithetical and antagonistic.

英国和德国的科学诗歌和诗学，从文艺复兴到启蒙运动这个项目探索了大量基本上不为人知的科学诗歌，涉及地质学、天文学和植物学等科学领域，以及相应的科学诗学，一种富有想象力的审美品质新兴学科。它将揭示文艺复兴、复辟和启蒙文化充满活力的一面：不仅产生新思想，而且产生思考这些思想的新形式和词汇。这种诗意写作并不等同于散文，或者仅仅是“真正”科学的普及，而是积极地理解其实践，以解决散文无法探究的物理和形而上学世界的细微差别。这个时代认为，诗歌不仅仅是装饰，而是揭示创造世界的深层结构。这种潜力是由这一时期新兴的文学批评理论化的，研究表明，这种实践的发展与现代科学明显平行。该项目将发掘并分析大量女性作品，其中大部分仍为手稿，这些作品将其神科学思想发挥到令人眼花缭乱的效果，以及大量新拉丁诗歌，主题从输血到飞行理论。它还将展示这一非凡的科学文献及其敏捷诗学的传播，其影响力可以在整个北欧运作的一系列网络中看到——拉丁语、德语以及英语，并且它将追溯悠久的历史17 世纪末和 18 世纪初，科学说教诗句的变形和变异尤其具有戏剧性的影响。该研究解决了英国和德国学术界的空白。虽然最近的作品探讨了早期现代科学的修辞特征，但它几乎完全集中于散文写作，通常是后期男性作家用白话文写作的作品。这项研究将表明，在 17 世纪和 18 世纪，诗歌写作不仅是传播自然哲学知识的核心，而且共享的想象力过程如何被认为可以为这两个领域提供信息。学术界这一盲点的后果之一就是彻底忽视了早期欧洲启蒙运动中一项重要的英德诗歌科学转移。该项目重新表述了那个时代的诗学思想——宇宙诗学、神诗学和物理神学——关系到我们如何理解英国和德国在这个最动荡的时期出现的美学。它还将揭示大量关于科学知识和诗歌形式的构成和参考密度，正是因为其话语的波动性和万花筒般的能力而受到重视的写作。该项目开启了英德两国对尚未研究的欧洲公共文学的视角，并通过对各自文本语料库和档案发现的探索，合作有望揭示已被理解的学科中的联系和其他隐藏的相似之处在关于科学和人文“两种文化”的争论中，科学和人文是对立和对立的。