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Author: Courtney Weiss Smith Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813938392 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established, Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist thinking in which the techniques and emphases of science, religion, and literature combined and cooperated. This brand of empiricism was committed to particularized scrutiny and epistemological modesty. It was Protestant in its enabling premises and meditative practices. It earnestly affirmed that figurative language provided crucial tools for interpreting the divinely written world. Smith recovers this empiricism in Robert Boyle’s analogies, Isaac Newton’s metaphors, John Locke’s narratives, Joseph Addison’s personifications, Daniel Defoe’s diction, John Gay’s periphrases, and Alexander Pope’s descriptive particulars. She thereby demonstrates that "literary" language played a key role in shaping and giving voice to the concerns of eighteenth-century science and religion alike. Empiricist Devotions combines intellectual history with close readings of a wide variety of texts, from sermons, devotional journals, and economic tracts to georgic poems, it-narratives, and microscopy treatises. This prizewinning book has important implications for our understanding of cultural and literary history, as scholars of the period’s science have not fully appreciated figurative language’s central role in empiricist thought, while scholars of its religion and literature have neglected the serious empiricist commitments motivating richly figurative devotional and poetic texts. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Author: Courtney Weiss Smith Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813938392 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Featuring a moment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England before the disciplinary divisions that we inherit today were established, Empiricist Devotions recovers a kind of empiricist thinking in which the techniques and emphases of science, religion, and literature combined and cooperated. This brand of empiricism was committed to particularized scrutiny and epistemological modesty. It was Protestant in its enabling premises and meditative practices. It earnestly affirmed that figurative language provided crucial tools for interpreting the divinely written world. Smith recovers this empiricism in Robert Boyle’s analogies, Isaac Newton’s metaphors, John Locke’s narratives, Joseph Addison’s personifications, Daniel Defoe’s diction, John Gay’s periphrases, and Alexander Pope’s descriptive particulars. She thereby demonstrates that "literary" language played a key role in shaping and giving voice to the concerns of eighteenth-century science and religion alike. Empiricist Devotions combines intellectual history with close readings of a wide variety of texts, from sermons, devotional journals, and economic tracts to georgic poems, it-narratives, and microscopy treatises. This prizewinning book has important implications for our understanding of cultural and literary history, as scholars of the period’s science have not fully appreciated figurative language’s central role in empiricist thought, while scholars of its religion and literature have neglected the serious empiricist commitments motivating richly figurative devotional and poetic texts. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an Outstanding Work of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Author: Roger Maioli Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319398598 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
This book is about the empiricist challenge to literature, and its influence on eighteenth-century theories of fiction. British empiricism from Bacon to Hume challenged the notion that imaginative literature can be a reliable source of knowledge. This book argues that theorists of the novel, from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen, recognized the force of the empiricist challenge but refused to capitulate. It traces how, in their reflections on the novel, these writers attempted to formulate a theoretical link between the world of experience and the products of the imagination, and thus update the old defenses of poetry for empirical times. Taken together, the empiricist challenge and the responses it elicited signaled a transition in the longstanding debate about literature and knowledge, as an inaugural round in the persisting conflict between the empirical sciences and the literary humanities.
Author: Rosalind Powell Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526157039 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. The book examines how sensory experience is conceptualised during the period, drawing novel connections between treatments of perception as an embodied phenomenon and the creative methods employed by natural philosophers. Covering a wealth of literary, theological, and pedagogical texts that engage with astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body, it argues for the significance of analogies for conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. As well as identifying their use in religious and topographical poetry, the book addresses how analogies are visible in material culture through objects such as orreries, camera obscuras, and aeolian harps. It makes the vital claim that scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.
Author: Robin Runia Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351334573 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
There is an unfortunate argument being made that feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literary studies has fulfilled its potential in academic circles. The Future of Eighteenth-Century Feminist Scholarship: Beyond Recovery shows us otherwise. Each of the essays in this volume reaffirms the feminist principles that form the foundation of this area, then builds upon them by acknowledging the inevitable conflicts they or their subjects have faced and the contradictions they or their subjects have lived.
Author: Joseph Kenny Publisher: CRVP ISBN: 1565182308 Category : Education, Higher Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
Bevat: Liberal versus practical orientation of curriculum development / Olusegun Oladipo ; Lessons of world history of the university for Nigeria today / Joseph Kenny ; Human capital in Nigerian universities : the presence of the past and the thrust of the future / Ifeanyi Onyeonoru ; University decline and its reasons : imperatives for change and relevance / Francis Egbokhare ; Knowledge production, cultural identity and globalization : African universities and the challenges of authenticity and transformation in the twenty-first century / Kolawole A. Owolabi ; Idealism versus pragmatism in the production of knowledge in Nigerian universities / Olatunji A. Oyeshile ; The university and the African crisis of morality : lessons from Nigeria / Ogbo Ugwuanyi ; Subjectivity, hermeneutics and culture / George F. Mclean ; Value systems and the interest groups of a university / Francis M. Isichei ; The place of theology in the university curriculum / Anthony A. Akinwale.
Author: Stephanie Insley Hershinow Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 1421438836 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Drawing on bold close readings, Born Yesterday alters the landscape of literary historical eighteenth-century studies and challenges some of novel theory's most well-worn assumptions.
Author: Rhys Bezzant Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ISBN: 3647554618 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
Jonathan Edwards engaged in notable ways with the church in Germany through his writings on spirituality, theology and missiology, but this contribution has rarely been acknowledged in academic publications. In this book scholars who have an interest in both Edwards and the church in Europe offer contributions to a significant worldwide conversation on Edwards's texts and teachings. He found an ally in Martin Luther, sought out encouragement from German Pietists, and engaged with Western traditions of philosophy which proved useful in sharpening subsequent reflection on God's work in the world. Edwards was not just a remote colonial American pastor, but an active participant in the transatlantic republic of letters and contributed to the birth of the global missions movement, for which the church in Germany was itself a significant base.
Author: Jess Keiser Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813944791 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
"The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system became the site for a series of elaborate fantasies. The pineal gland is transformed into a throne for the sovereign soul. Animal spirits march the nerves like parading soldiers. An internal archivist searches through cerebral impressions to locate certain memories. An anatomist discovers that the brain of a fashionable man is stuffed full of beautiful clothes and billet-doux. A hypochondriac worries that his own brain will be disassembled like a watch. A sentimentalist sees the entire world as a giant nervous system comprising sympathetic spectators. Nervous Fictions is the first account of the Enlightenment origins of neuroscience and the "active fancies" it generated. By surveying the work of scientists (Willis, Newton, Cheyne), philosophers (Descartes, Cavendish, Locke), satirists (Swift, Pope), and novelists (Haywood, Fielding, Sterne), Keiser shows how attempts to understand the brain’s relationship to the mind produced in turn new literary forms. Early brain anatomists turned to tropes to explicate psyche and cerebrum, just as poets and novelists found themselves exploring new kinds of mental and physical interiority. In this respect, literary language became a tool to aid scientific investigation, while science spurred literary invention.
Author: Sarah Eron Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1003845266 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 905
Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.
Author: Courtney Weiss Smith
Author: Courtney Weiss Smith
Author: Roger Maioli
Author: Rosalind Powell
Author: Robin Runia
Author: Joseph Kenny
Author: Stephanie Insley Hershinow
Author: Rhys Bezzant
Author: Steven Meyer
Author: Jess Keiser
Author: Sarah Eron