Creativity and Science joins the ongoing discussion about how literature engages with theories and practices of science and their impact on the wider cultural imaginary. English-language audiences know this engagement through works by authors ranging from C. P. Snow and Aldous Huxley to J. G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon: works that have often fed a dystopian or apocalyptic vision of the world, in which rational enterprise and artistic innovation have come to an end, and society is set on a path of inexorable decline. In Creativity and Science, Joanna Page brings to us an exploration of Argentine fiction that challenge such visions. Examining the works of Marcelo Cohen, Guillermo Martínez and Ricardo Piglia, Page argues that these writers draw on models and theories from mathematics and science and put them to a very different use than their English-language counterparts: to defend intellectual activity and to testify to the endless capacity of literature to thrive through self-renewal, reinvention and the creation of new forms.

The syntheses these writers imagine between literature and science - and that they allow us to imagine in turn, suggests Page - are more productive and nuanced than many of those that have shaped recent debates on literature, science, and ethnology within the European and North American academies. This is the first book-length study in English of three key authors in contemporary Argentine literature. It also makes an important contribution to theories of newness and creativity, tracing unexpected relationships between thinkers such as Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Russian Formalists. Book jacket.