This volume sheds light on the nexus between knowledge and literature. Arranged historically, contributions address both popular and canonical English and US-American writing from the early modern period to the present. They focus on how historically specific texts engage with epistemological questions in relation to material and social forms as well as representation. The authors discuss literature as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right, which deploys narrative and poetic means of exploration to establish an independent and sometimes dissident archive. The worlds that imaginary texts project are shown to open up alternative perspectives to be reckoned with in the academic articulation and public discussion of issues in economics and the sciences, identity formation and wellbeing, legal rationale and political decision-making.

Antje Kley: "What Literature Knows: An Introduction" 9 // Kai Merten: "'His ignorance were wise': Gendered Knowledge in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594/95)" 27 // Richard Nate: "'The pleasing visions I had formed': Natural Knowledge and Self-Awareness in Jonathan Swift’s Satires" 45 // Albert Meier: "Access Denied: English Experiences in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Travel Report of 1782" 65 // Marcel Hartwig: "Fothergill’s Web: Transnational Quaker Networks and the Pennsylvania Medical Library" 79 // Anthony John Harding: "Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), and the Crisis of Knowledge" 93 // Justus Conrad Gronau: "Romanticism and Anoetic Knowledge" 113 // Philipp Erchinger: "Curious to Know: John Clare’s 'The Nightingale’s Nest' (1832)" 135 // Maria Kaspirek: Negotiating Authority: Literary and Medical Confgurations of Knowledge in 19th-Century America" 155 // Cord-Christian Casper: "The Fourth Dimension and Impossible Knowledge in
Edwardian Speculative Fiction" 173 // Aleksandra Boss and Martin Klepper: "What Nancy Knew, What Carol Knew: Mass Literature and Knowledge" 193 // Matthias Bauer: "Scientifc Knowledge and the Display Function of Literature: The White Hotel (1981) and Freud’s Megalomania (2000)" 215 // Daniel Schäbler: "The Art of Deception: Knowledge Distribution in English Literature" 235 // Ann Spangenberg: "'We are only what we know': Knowledge in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004)" 253 // Jutta Zimmermann: "Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000) as Multi-Narrative: The Dialogic Relation of Indigenous and Western World Views" 275 // André Schwarck: "'Useless, of-beat information!': Knowledge and Successiveness in Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney (1994)" 297 // Anja Pistor-Hatam: "Historiography and the Production of Knowledge: The Mongol Period" 319 //