Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness PDF full book. Access full book title Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness by Brian Michael Norton. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Brian Michael Norton
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611484316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel’s participation in eighteenth-century “inquiries after happiness,” an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton’s innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His centralargument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual’s psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one’s power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment’s ethical legacy.
Author: Brian Michael Norton
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611484316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel’s participation in eighteenth-century “inquiries after happiness,” an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton’s innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His centralargument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual’s psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one’s power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment’s ethical legacy.
Author: Jorge Estrada
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110657899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 597
Get Book Here
Book Description
Experiencing ethics not only refers to being confronted with a situation in which one must choose a course of action; it also makes reference to giving a narrative account of the circumstances and chain of events leading to such crossroads. Between both there is a chasm, a space of indeterminacy into which R. Musil and L. Sterne delve with aesthetic means. Their poetics move in opposite directions, but by following them to their last critical consequences this study reveals a kindred ethical stance. This interpretation sheds light on the ethics revolving around character construction by examining the constraints thwarting any attempt to complete a biographical account or convey a protagonist that led his or her life. Neither Musil nor Sterne posit a narrative agenda that could reach a last chapter or lead to a groundwork determining their ethics. A closer look into their tight-knit prose reveals that both rely on the narrating, on a skill that must be incessantly cultivated through a digressive or essayistic style. Equipped with a vast theoretical repertoire, this approach makes a strong case for a new constellation in comparative literature.
Author: Thomas Keymer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195175608
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book Here
Book Description
Thomas Keymer's introduction to this casebook examines the historical context and controversial reception of Tristram Shandy, and connects the essays selected for inclusion to the diverse traditions of Sterne Criticism.
Author: Mary-Celine Newbould
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317185501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book Here
Book Description
Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. In placing her examination of Sterneana within the context of its production, Newbould demonstrates how literary adaptation operates across generic and formal boundaries. She breaks new ground by bringing together several potentially disparate aspects of Sterneana belonging to areas of literary studies that include drama, music, travel writing, sentimental fiction and the visual. Her study is a vital resource for Sterne scholars and for readers generally interested in cultural productivity in this period.
Author: Ryan J. Stark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350177792
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes, and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary, we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas. Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the service of religion.
Author: John Richetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521429450
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.
Author: J. Parker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230607217
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
Get Book Here
Book Description
Drawing on the insights offered by contemporary chaos theory, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory explores how models of turbulent dynamical systems in the physical world parallel structures in certain kinds of narratives. By closely looking at Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Parker demonstrates how these insights can be applied to the analysis of narrative structure and meaning. This innovative interdisciplinary work will appeal to scholars interested in narratology and in the connection between chaos theory and literature.
Author: Alexis Tadié
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351897918
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Get Book Here
Book Description
This study addresses the intricate links between oral culture and literate culture in the eighteenth century. Tadié traces how perceptions and representations of language move from a dominance of the spoken work to a dominance of the written word; and this is echoed in the order of the five chapters on conversation, gesture, theatre, fiction, and print. Tadié offers a reading of Sterne's works, arguing that the use of language lies at the centre of Sterne's art; he approaches the historical dimension of the texts in the context of eighteenth-century theories of language. He brings into focus the heterogeneity of Sterne's texts; and he demonstrates how Sterne's awareness for the variations of language links up with his interest in the form of the book, and with the use of all the potentialities of print. The study broaches the issue of the 'rise of the novel' in the eighteenth century. it refuses the idea of progress, or of slow emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century, which would lead progressively from Defoe to the Fielding-Richardson debate, to a possible view of Sterne as the great ironist of the form of the novel. Tadié asserts that Sterne's writings do not simply address the nature of the novel, but they engage with all the forms of language representation made available by the culture of the age.
Author: Tom Keymer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521604406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book Here
Book Description
Whilst drawing to some extent on recent theoretical studies, this book restores Clarissa to its largely neglected eighteenth-century context.
Author: Frank Donoghue
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804725637
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
Principally on Sterne, Goldsmith and Smollett.
