Gaston Bachelard occupies a pivotal position in twentieth-century French intellectual life. His works and reputation span the two fields that, in modern European culture, are generally considered antitheses: poetics and science. In each of these fields Bachelard carved out a distinctive reputation characterized by his rejection of the methodological conventions of his precursors and contemporaries. The significance of his work can be gauged by the extension of his influence beyond the philosophy of science and poetics and into the philosophy of the human sciences (as in the work of Michel Foucault), the literary criticism of scholars such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, and the history of science (as exemplified by Georges Canguilhem). In contrast to his centrality within French intellectual culture, the uneven translation of Bachelard's work into English has linked his name in Anglo-American cultures to his works on poetics rather than science. This uneven process...