This is not a book about Victorian knowledge, but about the activities through which knowledge is brought into being, sustained, debated, modified, adapted, corrected, used, reimagined, extended and made subject to continuous transformation and change. In fact, all that follows is premised on the assumption that there is no knowledge without (or outside of) practices and processes that assemble and disassemble it, or that put it to work, thus exposing it to the possibility of becoming otherwise. ‘[I]f there is a sun around which all else revolves, it is performance, not knowledge,’ as Andrew Pickering puts it, ‘knowledge is a planet or maybe a comet that sometimes participates in the dynamics of practice and sometimes does not’. Building on this assumption, my title promises a work about ways of knowing, about pursuits of what is not yet (not quite) or no longer known, rather than about the ideas and theories in which such pursuits may be taken to originate or terminate. In short, this book is concerned with what takes place in the midst of ongoing knowledge formation, on the way towards goals and insights that are yet to be (more precisely) defined. It examines what I call the experimental field, the scene of emergent meaning, in which people's experiences of the material world come to be gradually translated, by means of actions, instruments, controversies and skills, into forms of generally readable, but not necessarily finished text.

Being a literary scholar, I will specifically explore how these ‘processes of finding out and making sense’ are debated and carried out in writing, by means of literature in the most general sense of ‘everything written with letters or printed in a book’, as Matthew Arnold has it. Yet, much of the methodical approach that informs my readings has been suggested by historical and sociological studies of ‘science in action’.