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- Title
Dr Fossile's Crocodile: Science and the 'Oriental Chronotope' in Eighteenth-Century Literature.
- Authors
Risling, Matthew
- Abstract
This article explores eighteenth-century questions surrounding the spatiotemporal nature of the field we now call 'science'. Today's commonplace notion of 'modern Western science' assumes conceptual binaries that do not map onto eighteenth-century discourses. The article focuses on two works by the so-called Scriblerians —Three Hours after Marriage (1717), and Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1714, pub. 1741)—which satirize the much-maligned Dr John Woodward and, ostensibly, the philosophical mode he represented. Though these texts are satirical, the article does not posit a clash of cultures. Instead, it examines a set of tropes, shared by numerous authors at various purposes, which inflected science with the narratological space-time of the ancient Orient. This 'Oriental chronotope' (in Bakhtinian terms) speaks to the complex space that science occupied in emerging narratives of Western modernity. The Eastern artefacts featured in these works, and their shared themes of dubious reproduction, establish an unlikely affinity with Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667), which offers the new sciences as a dialectic between the ancient and modern worlds.
- Subjects
MEMOIRS of Martinus Scriblerus (Book); THREE Hours After Marriage (Theatrical production); HISTORY of the Royal Society (Book); SPRAT, Thomas; BAKHTINIAN analysis
- Publication
Review of English Studies, 2021, Vol 72, Issue 304, p321
- ISSN
0034-6551
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/res/hgaa093