Author: Mary Thomas Crane During the scientific revolution, the dominant Aristotelian picture of nature, which cohered closely with common sense and ordinary perceptual experience, was completely overthrown. Although we now take for granted the ideas that the earth revolves around the sun and that seemingly solid matter is composed of tiny particles, these concepts seemed equally counterintuitive, anxiety provoking, and at odds with our ancestors embodied experience of the world. In Losing Touch with Nature, Mary Thomas Crane examines the complex way that the new sciences threat to intuitive Aristotelian notions of the natural world was treated and reflected in the work of Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and other early modern writers. Crane breaks new ground by arguing that sixteenth-century ideas about the universe were actually much more sophisticated, rational, and observation-based than many literary critics have assumed. The earliest stages of the scientific revolution in England were most powerfully experienced as a divergence of intuitive science from official science, causing a schism between embodied human experience of the world and learned explanations of how the world works. This fascinating book traces the growing awareness of that epistemological gap through textbooks and natural philosophy treatises to canonical poetry and plays, presciently registering and exploring the magnitude of the human loss that accompanied the beginnings of modern science.

Author: Don Marion Wolfe In narrative and some 120 pictures, Don M. Wolfe traces Milton's life in the context of the public events and common scenes of his time. His illustrations and vignettes, supported by passages from the history of the period as well as the poet's own writings, bring to life the people, politics, and society of seventeenth-century England: maidens carrying fresh cream and cheese on their heads, men with hats and caps to sell; the Long Parliament of 1640; Charles I's summary trial and execution; Cromwell's Protectorate; the London Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666; the publication of Paradise Lost.The principal figure is, of course, John Milton, seen first as a boy of ten, sober and confident, even then a poet. He is seen also as a traveler to the continent in 1638-1639, when he filled his mind with scenes and places that he would use in Paradise Lost: the sulphuric Phlegraean Fields outside Naples; Galileo, the Tuscan artist with optic glass. Milton the revolutionary is described, the libertarian pamphleteer whose passionate cry that every man had the right to know, to utter, to argue freely was realized around the campfires of the New Model Army. Throughout, Milton is depicted also as the poet aspiring to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it diehis creative genius coming forth at last in Paradise Lost and his final major work, Samson Agonistes.Originally published in 1971.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: edited by Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers For four decades, Venezuela prided itself for having one of the most stable representative democracies in Latin America. Then, in 1992, Hugo Ch

Author: Warner Berthoff In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences. He also puts forth that there are recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what is distinctively American, what both reflects and speaks for a shared national experience. Discussions of Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Edmund Wilson focus on the provenance and central character of writing by mainstream figures in our literary past. The essays on Brockden Brown, Nathan Asch, O. Henry, Frank O'Hara, Lewis Mumford, and Van Wyck Brooks highlight marginal, neglected, forgotten, or not yet fully acknowledged contributors to American writing.