"This book offers a new account of literature's role in the intellectual history of early modernity, a period beset by uncertainty as older frameworks of knowledge were questioned, even upended. Showing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Debapriya Sarkar argues for early modern literature's significance as a vital philosophical endeavor. She theorizes "possible knowledge" as a distinct intellectual paradigm crafted by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers who used literary forms to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. Sarkar explores the imaginative habits of thought that enabled early modern thinkers-including Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Bacon, Spenser, and Cavendish-to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, this book suggests that what we term a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination"--
