Fact and Fiction

Christine Lehleiter is an associate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto.

‘The contributions succeed in both advancing understandings of historical processes of disciplinary differentiation and integration from the eighteenth century onwards and in introducing new perspectives on perennial debates concerning the potential value of literary cultures to the production of scientific knowledge. For this, perhaps above all else, the volume deserves a wide readership.’- Steve Howe (European Romantic Review vol 28:04:2017) ‘This collected volume presents a timely intervention into current disciplinary debates about the humanities and sciences…Fact and Fiction is an excellent example of interdisciplinary work in humanities.’- Yevgenya Strakovsky (Monatshefte vol 110:01:2018) "This volume should be welcomed as an essential contribution to inter-disciplinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies… It is an exemplary instance of the translation of a symposium into a published work and will be appreciated by researchers and advanced students of historical cultural studies in Europe as well as specialists in the question of literature and science."- Joseph D. O'Neil, University of Kentucky (University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018)

• Introduction. Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain Thoughts on a Contentious RelationshipChristine LehleiterPART I Reading: Electricity, Medicine1 Facts Are What One Makes of Them: Constructing the Faktum in the Enlightenment and Early German RomanticismJocelyn Holland2 The Competing Structures of Signification in Samuel Hahnemann’s Homeopathy: Between 18th-century Semiosis and Romantic HermeneuticsAlice KuzniarPART II Imagining: Botany, Chemistry, Thermodynamics3 “She comes! – the GODDESS!”: Narrating Nature in Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791)Ann Shteir4 Elective Affinities / Wahlverwandtschaften: The Career of a MetaphorChristian Weber5 Physics Disarmed: Probabilistic Knowledge in the Works of James Clerk Maxwell and George EliotTina Young ChoiPART III Sensing: Anthropology, Psychology, Aesthetics6 Herder’s Unsettling of the Distinction between Fact and FictionJohn K. Noyes7 Fictional Feedback: Empirical Souls and Self-Deception in the Magazine for Empirical Psychology and BeyondMichael House8 Fictional Feelings Psychological Aesthetics and the Paradox of Tragic PleasureTobias WilkePART IV Relating: Biology9 Coining a Discipline: Lessing, Reimarus, and a Science of ReligionStefani Engelstein10 Kin Selection, Mendel’s “Salutary Principle,” and the Fate of Characters in Forster’s Longest JourneyDaniel Aureliano Newman PART V Displaying: Scientific Collections11 Anatomy Collections in and of the Mind: Science, the Body and Language in the Writings of Durs GrÜnbein and Thomas HettchePeter M. McIsaac12 Vivifying the Uncanny: Ethnographic Mannequins and Exotic Performers in Nineteenth-Century German Exhibition CultureDana Weber