Allegory in Enlightenment Britain

Allegory in Enlightenment Britain PDF Author: Jason J. Gulya
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303119036X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
This Palgrave Pivot argues for the significance of allegory in Enlightenment writing. While eighteenth-century allegory has often been dismissed as an inadequate form, both in its time and in later scholarship, this short book reveals how Enlightenment writers adapted allegory to the cultural changes of the time. It examines how these writers analyzed earlier allegories with scientific precision and broke up allegory into parts to combine it with other genres. These experimentations in allegory reflected the effects of empiricism, secularization and a modern aesthetic that were transforming Enlightenment culture. Using a broad range of examples – including classics of the genre, eighteenth-century texts and periodicals – this book argues that the eighteenth century helped make allegory the flexible, protean literary form it is today.

Allegory in Enlightenment Britain

Allegory in Enlightenment Britain PDF Author: Jason J. Gulya
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303119036X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Get Book Here

Book Description
This Palgrave Pivot argues for the significance of allegory in Enlightenment writing. While eighteenth-century allegory has often been dismissed as an inadequate form, both in its time and in later scholarship, this short book reveals how Enlightenment writers adapted allegory to the cultural changes of the time. It examines how these writers analyzed earlier allegories with scientific precision and broke up allegory into parts to combine it with other genres. These experimentations in allegory reflected the effects of empiricism, secularization and a modern aesthetic that were transforming Enlightenment culture. Using a broad range of examples – including classics of the genre, eighteenth-century texts and periodicals – this book argues that the eighteenth century helped make allegory the flexible, protean literary form it is today.

Uncivil Mirth

Uncivil Mirth PDF Author: Ross Carroll
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220530
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justice The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power. Ross Carroll brings to life a tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. He shows how the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on pretension and authority. Drawing on philosophical treatises, political pamphlets, and conduct manuals of the time, Carroll examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris. Casting Enlightenment Britain in an entirely new light, Uncivil Mirth demonstrates how the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.

Enlightenment Orientalism

Enlightenment Orientalism PDF Author: Srinivas Aravamudan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226024482
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.

Paradigms for a Metaphorology

Paradigms for a Metaphorology PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080147695X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought? In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. "Absolute metaphors" answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill. An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction PDF Author: Jason Marc Harris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317134656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

The Battle of the Books

The Battle of the Books PDF Author: Jonathan Swift
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description


Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England

Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England PDF Author: Joanna Picciotto
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674049062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 888

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Book Description
"Joanna Picciotto's Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England is a splendid study of the origins, devlopment, and eventual decline of the Experimentalist tradition in seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century English letters. In tracing out the arc of this intellectual and professional trajectory, Picciotto engages productively with the crucial religious, socio-economic, philosophical, and literary movements associated with the ongoing labors of the `innocent eye'".---Eileen Reeves, Princetion University --

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter PDF Author: Mary Helen McMurran
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442622253
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism

The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism PDF Author: Mark Canuel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192895303
Category : Romanticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about progress and perfection? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive thinking in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement--increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury--they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley's plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith's motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The majestic edifices of Wordsworth's imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are republican or pious, not to mention the recalcitrant enthusiast who is the poet himself.

The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence 1750-1810

The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence 1750-1810 PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198912188
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
This is the second volume of the Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence 1750-1810. Reverend James Wodrow (1730-1810), minister of the Church of Scotland at Stevenston in Ayrshire, and Samuel Kenrick (1728-1811), tutor to a Renfrewshire family until 1763, and subsequently a merchant and banker in Bewdley, Worcestershire, began corresponding around 1750, soon after leaving the University of Glasgow. They continued to do so until James Wodrow's death in 1810. Their correspondence is an exceptionally rich resource for the study of British culture and society in the era of Enlightenment and revolutions, here made easily available to scholars for the first time. Samuel Kenrick lived in England from 1765, and the men only met again in 1789, so their friendship was carried out almost entirely on paper for forty-five years. The correspondence constitutes a remarkable record of a friendship. In Volume 2: 1784-1790, Wodrow and Kenrick were long established in successful careers, and their daughters were now adults. A major theme in this book is Mary Kenrick's visit to Scotland to stay with the Wodrow family in summer 1784, and Helen 'Nell' Wodrow's return with her to Bewdley, to become part of the Kenrick household until September 1785. Wodrow himself visited Bewdley, on the only occasions he ever did this, in early September and late October 1788, on his way to and from London to arrange for the publication of two volumes of the sermons of his mentor, Principal William Leechman of Glasgow University. As well as discussing family, friendship, and the practicalities of publishing, the letters in this volume contain lively and highly readable exchanges on theology and church politics in Scotland and England, university politics in Glasgow, a wide range of contemporary literature, and an enormous spectrum of famous and less well-known politicians, authors, clergymen, and local figures in Ayrshire and Worcestershire.