ABSTRACT
Introducing the idea of the “literary-scientific revolution,” this chapter outlines some of the central methods and premises of the book. It also provides a brief outline of the five chapters to follow. Across these five chapters, I demonstrate different aspects of the tense and often still productive relation between figuration and science in the early modern world. Changes in science certainly contributed to what I am calling the “literary revolution,” particularly to the demise of allegory, but different modes of figuration, including allegory, also contributed routinely to the “scientific” one. Speaking of separate revolutions already, to some extent, misses the point. My aim is to show that historical changes we now tend to think of as predominately scientific in nature had implications for, and were implicated by, changes in literary structure; to show that the “scientific revolution” was literary, and the “literary revolution” scientific.
