Author: Richard B. Sher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226752542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 842
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Book Description
The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.
Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300139349
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
The historical philosophy of the Enlightenment -- The Scottish Enlightenment -- Pietro Giannone and Great Britain -- Dimitrie Cantemir's Ottoman history and its reception in England -- From deism to history: Conyers Middleton -- David Hume, historian -- The idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire -- Gibbon and the publication of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire 1776-1976 -- Gibbon's last project -- The romantic movement and the study of history -- Lord Macaulay: the history of England -- Thomas Carlyle's historical philosophy -- Jacob Burckhardt.
Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1008
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Book Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
Author: James MacGregor Burns
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250024900
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explores history’s most daring and transformational intellectual movement, the European and American Enlightenment. In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World. They transformed thought, overturned governments, and inspired visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to life the revolutionary leaders who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, created the modern world. Burns traces the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment to men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same principles have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab world, in the former Soviet Union, and in China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead, and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns’s exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions. Praise for Fire and Light “With this profound and magnificent book, Burns takes us into the fire’s center. . . . Essential for deciphering the challenges of the world we will live in tomorrow.” —Michael Beschloss, New York Times–bestselling author of Presidential Courage “James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America—for better and for worse—what it is.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of Revolutionary Summer “[A] captivating tale. . . . Briskly and beautifully told. . . . Superb.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Dan Edelstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226184498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In this concise, bold, and innovative book, Dan Edelstein offers us an original account of the Enlightenment. It convincingly argues that the Enlightenment is above all a narrative about social and cultural changes and that its origins can be found in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Therefore, by reconsidering the importance of the French esprit philosophique in the Euroean Enlightenment, this book will be of considerable importance for every scholar and student interested in this period.
Author: Richard A. Barney
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804729789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Plots of Enlightenment explores the emergence of the English novel during the early 1700s as a preeminent form of popular education at a time when educators were defining a new kind of "modern" English citizenship for both men and women. This new individual was imagined neither as the free, self-determined figure of early modern liberalism or republicanism, nor, at the other extreme, as the product of a nearly totalized disciplinary regimen. Instead, this new citizen materialized from the tensile process of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "regulated improvisation," a strategy of performed individual identity that combines both social orchestration and individual agency. This book considers how the period's diverse forms of educational writing (including chapbooks, conduct books, and philosophical treatises) and the most innovative educational institutions of the age (such as charity schools, working schools, and proposed academies for young women) produced a shared concept of improvised identity also shaped by the early novel's pedagogical agenda. The model of improvised subjectivity contributed to new ways of imagining English individuality as both a private and public entity; it also empowered women authors, both educators and novelists, to transform traditional ideals of femininity in forming their own protofeminist versions of enlightened female identity. While offering a comprehensive account of the novel's educational status during the Enlightenment, Plots of Enlightenment focuses particularly on the first half of the eighteenth century, when novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox were first exploring concepts of fictional character based on educational and moral improvisation. A close examination of these authors' work illustrates further that by the 1750s, the improvisational impulse in England had forged the first perceptible outlines of the fictional subgenre later called the novel of education or the Bildungsroman. This book is the first study of its kind to account for the complex interplay between the individualist and collectivist protocols of early modern fiction, with an eye toward articulating a comprehensive description of socialization and literary form that can accommodate the similarities and differences in the works of both male and female writers.
Author: Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674023222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
This concise literary history of the American Enlightenment captures the varied and conflicting voices of religious and political conviction in the decades when the new nation was formed. Robert Ferguson's trenchant interpretation yields new understanding of this pivotal period for American culture.
Author: Rachel Linden
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 0785221417
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
In a romantic adventure that travels the globe, The Enlightenment of Bees beautifully explores what it means to find the sweet spot in life where our greatest passions meet the world’s greatest need. Sometimes a shattered heart leads to an amazing journey. At twenty-six, apprentice baker Mia West has her entire life planned out: a Craftsman cottage in Seattle, a job baking at The Butter Emporium, and her first love—her boyfriend, Ethan—by her side. But when Ethan declares he “needs some space,” Mia’s carefully planned future crumbles. Adrift and unsure where her future leads now, Mia joins her vivacious housemate Rosie on a humanitarian trip around the world funded by a reclusive billionaire. Along with a famous grunge rock star, a Rwandan immigrant, and an unsettlingly attractive Hawaiian urban farmer named Kai, Mia and Rosie embark on the adventure of a lifetime. From the slums of Mumbai to a Hungarian border camp during the refugee crisis, Mia’s heart is challenged and changed in astonishing ways—ways she never could have imagined if she hadn’t opened herself up to the opportunity. As she grapples with how to make a difference in a complicated world, Mia’s journey through self-discovery leaves her with the choice between the past she left behind and a new budding dream in her heart. “I combed through the pages with delight. This book is going to cause a real buzz.” —Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Author: Caroline Warman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783742038
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.
Author: Frederick Binkerd Artz
Publisher: Kent State University Press
ISBN: 9780873380324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
The founders of the Enlightenment in France are presented in this volume. The author emphasizes the practice as well as practical humanism and examines their fascination with science.
