Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure

Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure PDF Author: Larry D Carver
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526173676
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure provides a reading of Rochester's poems, dramatic works, and letters in a biographical context. It argues that there is a thematic unity--the pursuit of pleasure--underlying his work, that this pursuit is religiously motivated and reflects Rochester's preoccupation with and, finally, acceptance of Christianity.

Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure

Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure PDF Author: Larry D Carver
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526173676
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure provides a reading of Rochester's poems, dramatic works, and letters in a biographical context. It argues that there is a thematic unity--the pursuit of pleasure--underlying his work, that this pursuit is religiously motivated and reflects Rochester's preoccupation with and, finally, acceptance of Christianity.

Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England 1580-1720

Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England 1580-1720 PDF Author: Kenneth Sheppard
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004288163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Atheists generated widespread anxieties between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In response to such anxieties a distinct genre of religious apologetics emerged in England between 1580 and 1720. By examining the form and the content of the confutation of atheism, Anti-Atheism in Early Modern England demonstrates the prevalence of patterned assumptions and arguments about who an atheist was and what an atheist was supposed to believe, outlines and analyzes the major arguments against atheists, and traces the important changes and challenges to this apologetic discourse in the early Enlightenment.

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court PDF Author: J. Webster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403980284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism through reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. This eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences.

The Skeptical Sublime

The Skeptical Sublime PDF Author: James Noggle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190286555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing. The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents.

Eccentric Biography; Or, Lives of Extraordinary Characters

Eccentric Biography; Or, Lives of Extraordinary Characters PDF Author: Thomas Tegg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Eccentrics and eccentricities
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description


The Oxford English Literary History

The Oxford English Literary History PDF Author: Margaret J. M. Ezell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192537830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This volume covers the period 1645-1714, and removes the traditional literary period labels and boundaries used in earlier studies to categorize the literary culture of late seventeenth-century England. It invites readers to explore the continuities and the literary innovations occurring during six turbulent decades, as English readers and writers lived through unprecedented events including a King tried and executed by Parliament and another exiled, the creation of the national entity 'Great Britain', and an expanding English awareness of the New World as well as encounters with the cultures of Asia and the subcontinent. The period saw the establishment of new concepts of authorship and it saw a dramatic increase of women working as professional, commercial writers. London theatres closed by law in 1642 reopened with new forms of entertainments from musical theatrical spectaculars to contemporary comedies of manners with celebrity actors and actresses. Emerging literary forms such as epistolary fictions and topical essays were circulated and promoted by new media including newspapers, periodical publications, and advertising and laws were changing governing censorship and taking the initial steps in the development of copyright. It was a period which produced some of the most profound and influential literary expressions of religious faith from John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, while simultaneously giving rise to a culture of libertinism and savage polemical satire, as well as fostering the new dispassionate discourses of experimental sciences and the conventions of popular romance.

The Culture of Sensibility

The Culture of Sensibility PDF Author: G. J. Barker-Benfield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226037142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
During the eighteenth century, "sensibility," which once denoted merely the receptivity of the senses, came to mean a particular kind of acute and well-developed consciousness invested with spiritual and moral values and largely identified with women. How this change occurred and what it meant for society is the subject of G.J. Barker-Benfield's argument in favor of a "culture" of sensibility, in addition to the more familiar "cult." Barker-Benfield's expansive account traces the development of sensibility as a defining concept in literature, religion, politics, economics, education, domestic life, and the social world. He demonstrates that the "cult of sensibility" was at the heart of the culture of middle-class women that emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. The essence of this culture, Barker-Benfield reveals, was its articulation of women's consciousness in a world being transformed by the rise of consumerism that preceded the industrial revolution. The new commercial capitalism, while fostering the development of sensibility in men, helped many women to assert their own wishes for more power in the home and for pleasure in "the world" beyond. Barker-Benfield documents the emergence of the culture of sensibility from struggles over self-definition within individuals and, above all, between men and women as increasingly self-conscious groups. He discusses many writers, from Rochester through Hannah More, but pays particular attention to Mary Wollstonecraft as the century's most articulate analyst of the feminized culture of sensibility. Barker-Benfield's book shows how the cultivation of sensibility, while laying foundations for humanitarian reforms generally had as its primary concern the improvement of men's treatment of women. In the eighteenth-century identification of women with "virtue in distress" the author finds the roots of feminism, to the extent that it has expressed women's common sense of their victimization by men. Drawing on literature, philosophical psychology, social and economic thought, and a richly developed cultural background, The Culture of Sensibility offers an innovative and compelling way to understand the transformation of British culture in the eighteenth century.

Rochesteriana

Rochesteriana PDF Author: Johannes Prinz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description


Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature

Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature PDF Author: Warren Chernaik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521464970
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Sexual freedom and ideology explored in the works of seventeenth-century English literature.

Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse

Francis Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Discourse PDF Author: A. Funari
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230337910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
This book explores the resistance of three English poets to Francis Bacon's project to restore humanity to Adamic mastery over nature, moving beyond a discussion of the tension between Bacon and these poetic voices to suggest theywere also debating the narrative of humanity's intellectual path.