Mary Poovey
American literary scholar and cultural historian known for work on 19th-century British literature, the history of science and economics, and the formation of modern knowledge; author of A History of the Modern Fact, Uneven Developments, Making a Social Body, and Genres of the Credit Economy.
Books
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1. A History Of The Modern Fact
Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
A genealogy of how “facts” came to be treated as neutral, objective units of knowledge, this study traces their emergence from early modern practices like bookkeeping and experimental reporting through political arithmetic, classical political economy, and Victorian social investigation. It shows how genres, institutions, and conventions of enumeration and description standardized credibility, separated data from theory, and redefined authority across science, economics, and literature, ultimately revealing that facts are historically produced rather than self-evident givens.
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