Abstract
This essay examines the emergence of “scientific criticism” in the modern US research university in order to rethink longstanding conversations about whether literary studies is in fact a science. Histories of the discipline tend to focus in this regard on the impact of the natural and physical sciences on literary studies. By contrast, this essay explores the perhaps less likely but no less consequential influence of another upstart field, the social sciences. The methodological commonalities shared by “scientific charity” and “scientific criticism” ultimately offer a new genealogy of responses to the institutional hegemony of the scientific method at the turn of the twentieth century and anticipate contemporary interest in the sociology of literature.
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Carmody, T. (2020). Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific Charity, and the Matter of Evidence. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_11
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