{"id":166,"date":"2017-08-29T14:18:16","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T18:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/?page_id=166"},"modified":"2017-09-07T10:52:20","modified_gmt":"2017-09-07T14:52:20","slug":"oct-3-origins-of-the-royal-society-origins-of-the-novel-aaron-hanlon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/oct-3-origins-of-the-royal-society-origins-of-the-novel-aaron-hanlon\/","title":{"rendered":"Oct. 3 — Origins of the Royal Society, Origins of the Novel — Aaron Hanlon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When we think about the factors that led to the creation of the novel as a literary form in English, we might not think of the rise and institutionalization of experimental science. Yet the chartering of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge in 1662 had a profound impact on what novels and novelistic fiction would become in the 17th and 18th centuries, the formative years of the novel as we know it.\u00a0 This talk will address two important origin stories in Enlightenment history: the origins of the Royal Society and the origins of the novel.\u00a0 But it will also explain how these two origin stories overlap in telling ways that would change the histories of science and literature forever.<\/p>\n

Aaron Hanlon’s \u200bmost recent \u200b\u200bresearch\u200b focuses on how we organize knowledge,\u200b\u00a0how the domains of reality and fiction interact in the novel, and how science writing and the novel mutually construct our ideas of what we know and how we know it.\u00a0\u00a0His first book (in progress), “The Politics of Quixotism,” is a history of British and American exceptionalism traced through the popular figure of Don Quixote in the eighteenth century.\u00a0 In addition to numerous journal articles on literature, science, and political theory, Aaron writes for broader audiences at\u00a0The New Republic<\/em>,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>,\u00a0The Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>, and others.<\/p>\n