Disciplining the Imagination: Newtonianism and Prose Narrative in Eighteenth-Century Britain

"Disciplining the Imagination" examines the relationship between Newtonianism and prose narrative in eighteenth century Britain. The main argument made in this book is that writers like Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and David Hume enacted, dramatized and problematized the heightened confidence in human knowledgemaking abilities which characterized the widespread diffusion of Newtonianism. In these writers, prose narrative was used as a platform to explore the concept of fiction in light of the new epistemological standards of accuracy introduced by Isaac Newton's scientific works. The chapters of this book investigate how narrators in Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year", Fielding's "Tom Jones" and Hume's "The History of England" concern themselves with how to best acquire reliable knowledge on complex natural, social or cultural phenomena, while inviting their readers to reflect on the limits, and perils, of fiction.