Fictions of Knowledge

JOHN BENDER Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University, USA LORNA HUTSON Berry Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews UK SARAH TINDAL KAREEM Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA KATHRYN MURPHY Fellow and Tutor in English, Oriel College, Oxford, UK BARBARA J. SHAPIRO Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, USA CARL WATKINS Senior Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge, UK MICHAEL WOOD Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA

• Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; Y.Batsaki, S.Mukherji  & J.M.Schramm  Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The Evolution of a Concept; B.Shapiro Providence, Experience and Doubt in Medieval England; C.Watkins Law, Probability and Character in Shakespeare; L.Hutson Trying, Knowing and Believing: Epistemic Plots and the Poetics of Doubt; S.Mukherji The Anxiety of Variety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton and Bacon; K.Murphy Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment; J.Bender Lost in the Castle of Scepticism: Sceptical Philosophy as Gothic Romance; S.Kareem From Alchemy to Experiment: The Political Economy of Experience in William Godwin's St Leon: A Tale of The Sixteenth Century; Y.Batsaki Towards a Poetics of (Wrongful) Accusation: Innocence and Working-Class Voice in Mid-Victorian Fiction; J.M.Schramm Afterword; M.Wood Bibliography Index

“All the essays provide a complex but readable text, backed by massive scholarship, meticulously documented in the notes at their end. … the essays in Fictions of Knowledge offer rich and complex investigations of the fascinating world of knowledge in its varied manifestations in literary and non-literary texts, and should be of interest to all who are interested in meaningful connections between the two.” (Tej N. Dhar, The European Legacy, Vol. 20 (1), October, 2015)