Fictions of Knowledge : Fact, Evidence, Doubt

Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt locates literature at the intersection of areas of thinking focused on the nature, scope and methods of knowledge: philosophy, theology, science and the law. The essays engage with literary texts across a wide range of periods and genres to address the continuities and paradigmatic shifts in certain key epistemological categories. These include questions of probability and certainty, problems of evidence, the uses of experiment, and the poetics and ethics of doubt. Through its interdisciplinary and diachronic explorations, the volume registers the way in which imaginative literature responds to the pressures of particular historical moments, at the same time as it charts a larger history of the relation between literary thinking and epistemic practices in other fields.

YOTA BATSAKI Fellow in Comparative Cultural Studies at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, USA. Prior to that she was Lecturer in English at St John's College, Cambridge, UK. She has published essays on the eighteenth-century novel; cultural translation; and the relationship between literature and sculpture; she has also co-edited a volume on Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space (Harvard UP, forthcoming). SUBHA MUKHERJI Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Law and Representation in Early Modern England (CUP, 2006), and of numerous articles, mainly on Renaissance literature. She has co-edited Early Modern Tragicomedy (Boydell, 2007) and edited Thinking on Thresholds (Anthem, 2011). Her current book project is on the uses of doubt in early modern literature. JAN-MELISSA SCHRAMM Fellow and Lecturer in English at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology, Vicarious Experience in Nineteenth-Century Narrative: Substitution, Imposture, Atonement (forthcoming), and a number of articles on the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.