The New Science and Women's Literary Discourse Prefiguring Frankenstein [Hardcover]

Looking at literary discourse, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction, diaries, and drama, this collection offers remarkable and fascinating examples of women writers who integrated scientific material in their literary narratives.Introduction: Women, Education and the Margins of Science; J.A.Hayden Foreshadowing Frankenstein; S.Hutton Lucy Hutchinson and the Lucretian Body: Dreams of Order and Disorder; A.Snider Margaret Cavendish, Jan Baptiste van Helmont, and the Madness of the Womb; J.Broad Disability, Medicine, and Metaphysics in the Works of Lady Anne Conway; H.F.Nelson & S.Alker Aphra Behn and the Scientific Self; K.B.Gevirtz Mary Astell and Cartesian 'Scientia'; D.Boyle 'Will you never weary of these Whimsies?' Susanna Centlivre And the New Science; J.A.Hayden Discovering the Rhetoric of Science: Emilie Du Ch?telet's Dissertation Sur la Nature et Propagation du Feu; J.P.Zinsser Clockwork Character: Francis Burney's Invented Persons and the Origins of Mechanical Life; J.Park Elizabeth Inchbald's Animal Magnetism: A Critique of Medical Quackery and Exploitation of Women; F.L.Burwick New Sciences and Female Madness: The Cases of Mary Lamb, Margaret Nicholson, and Sophia Lee's Almeyda, Queen of Grenada; M.D.Purinton 'Embryo Systems and Unkindled Suns': Anna Barbauld and Astronomy in the Eighteenth Century; D.Wiegand Gender, Genre and Cultural Analysis: Anne Grant on the Highlands; P.Perkins

Complete unique...This interdisciplinary collection unites literary studies with the history of science to produce a carefully balanced and enjoyable survey that will appeal to a diverse readership. - Journal of British Studies

[The essays] present a coherent argument about women's contributions to the new science that is fascinating, engaging, and thought-provoking. - Isis

The New Science and Women's Literary Discourse: Prefiguring Frankenstein explores the multi-faceted engagement of women in the new science over the cl“+