About FDU Press

B.J Sokol(Goldsmith's College, London) has a background in science which enables him to go beyond what other literary critics have done in discussion of the knowledge revolution background of The Tempest. In A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare's «The Tempest» and Early Modern Epistemology Sokol ferrets out all the play's references to the new science and its sometimes ambiguous evaluation of this disturbing new information about the world. At the same time Sokol is sensitive to the connections between the real world and the imaginative world of the romance. He finds the same unsettling connections and contradictions, painful and playful and practical and even political, in the mindset of the period. so this book is a contribution not only to literary criticism but also to the history of ideas. Like Prospero, seventeenth-century society had to drown its old books and take a more realistic view of its place in the order of things as science replaced magic, facts contradicted dogmas and dissolved hopes, and new discoveries undermined old authorities and destroyed delusions of dominion.