Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2

Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68448-476-8
Verlag: Bucknell University Press

Buch, Englisch, 268 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 463 g

The Enlightenment has been linked to some of the most powerfully destructive developments of modern life: imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitation, scientific absolutism, totalitarian rule; and behind these developments, the domination of facts over values, quantity over quality, the abstract over the concrete, reason over humanity, division over connection. In this two-volume collection of career-spanning essays, influential literary critic Michael McKeon argues a more complicated view by practicing a different way of doing history: imagining these oppositions as the product not of the Enlightenment but of modern experience in its maturity. These essays conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, secularity, democracy, human rights, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude.

Volume 2 emphasizes the British Enlightenment’s effects on the future rather than its break with the past. McKeon urges us to distinguish between those aspects of the Enlightenment that eventually were used to organize epistemic violence and oppression from those aspects that were—and remain today—revolutionary. Taken together, these two volumes present a formidable defense of the Enlightenment’s liberating and ultimately transformative effects.
 
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mckeon, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
1 The Sciences as a Model for the Arts: A Synchronic Inquiry
2 From Ancient Mimesis to Modern Realism: A Diachronic Inquiry
3 The Historicity of Literary Conventions: Family Romance
4 The Historicity of Literary Genres: Pastoral Poetry
5 Political Poetry: Comparative Historicizing, 1650-1700, 1930-1980
6 Paradise Lost as Parody: Period, Genre, and Conjectural Interpretation
Acknowledgments
Source Notes
Notes
Index