The Voice of the Non-Human: Scientific Knowledge, It-Narratives and Fiction in the Long Eighteenth Century

This article examines the relationship between literature and science in eighteenth -century England through a series of It -Narratives, works in which everyday objects or animals tell their own stories and, at the same time, those of their various owners. These texts, which were very popular in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, have often been studied as expressions of the consumer culture of the time. In this article, It -Narratives will be discussed from an epistemological point of view. In particular, it will be argued that the dislocation of the human being from the position of narrator to that of "narrated" can be interpreted in light of the interest in natural things displayed by post -Baconian and Newtonian natural and experimental philosophy. Finally, the article will investigate the possibility of science and literature dialoguing through the concept of fiction, understood as a way of imagining alternative epistemologies in which human beings lose their centrality.