Debapriya Sarkar

Publications

Red book cover with an open window and the title "Possible Knowledge."
Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science
Debapriya Sarkar (Fletcher Jones, 2021-22)

Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes “possible knowledge” as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the “possible,” defined by Philip Sidney as what “may be and should be,” to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality.