Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Part I: Toward a disciplinary intellectual history -- Part II: Brown's epistemology -- Romancing Newton -- The locked closet -- A Cartesian plague -- Hume and repetition -- Kant and madness -- Coda -- Part III: Poe's methodology -- Is science deadly dull? -- Is there a life science? -- Undying literature -- Part IV: Hawthorne's technology -- The anxieties of alienation -- The problems of preemption -- Treachery betrayed -- Part V: After the revolutions: Brown and Dreiser, Poe and Pynchon, Hawthorne and Mailer -- Sister Caries, Brother Arthur -- Polar similarity -- The celestial spacecraft.

In this 1990 book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - three highly articulate and highly alarmed witnesses to the professionalisation of science, the great crisis in modern intellectual history. It was, he argues, especially specially difficult for American writers to face this crisis since they could make no appeal to traditional values: America, after all, had never really been a pre-scientific society.