Description
From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination—and how that imagination, in turn, responded.
Table of Contents
Preface: the normal scientific study of poetry; 1. William Carlos Williams, measurement and the origins of distant reading; 2. Laura Riding's exactitude; 3. The method wars; 4. The birth of close reading: instruments in I. A. Richards and Veronica Forrest-Thomson; Coda: machine learning and the history of style.
