Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850

Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 PDF

Author: Lawrence Eliot Klein

Publisher: Huntington Library Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13:

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These essays on the shifting content and value attached to "enthusiasm" treat a particular historical question and at the same time pose a general challenge to our methodological expectations. The contributors (Peter Fenves, Jan Goldstein, Lawrence E. Klein, Jon Mee, J. G. A. Pocock, Mary D. Sheriff, and Anthony J. La Vopa) study the discourses of religion, psychology, aesthetics, politics, and philosophy in which "enthusiasm" figured as a key term--often a pejorative by which various forms of orthodoxy sought to establish their authority, sometimes a desideratum attached to intellectual, spiritual, or artistic inspiration. By tracing these often parallel discourses in France, Germany, and England, the essays establish the value of a transnational framework for the issues of secularization and modernity, one that draws on the perspectives of intellectual as well as social and political history.

1650-1850

1650-1850 PDF

Author: Kevin L. Cope

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1684481724

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1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines literature, philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences.

Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment

Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment PDF

Author: Sarah Eron

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-03-20

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1611495008

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Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment reconsiders theories of apostrophe and poetic authority to argue that the Augustan age created a new form of inspiration, one that not only changed the relationship of literary production to authority in the modern period but also crucially contributes to defining the movement of secularization in literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Seeking to redefine what we mean by secularization in the early stages of modernity, Eron argues that secularization’s link to enthusiasm, or inspiration, often associated with Romanticism, begins in the imaginative literature of the early eighteenth century. If Romantic enthusiasm has been described through the rhetoric of transport, or “unworlding,” then Augustan invocation appears more akin to a process of “worlding” in its central aim to appeal to the social other as a function of the eighteenth-century belief in a literary public sphere. By reformulating the passive structure of ancient invocation and subjecting it to the more dialogical methods of modern apostrophe and address, authors such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld formally revise inspiration in a way that generates a new and distinctive representation of the author. In this context, inspiration becomes a social gesture—an apostrophe to a friend or judging spectator or an allusion to the mental or aesthetic faculties of the author himself, his genius. Articulating this struggle toward modernity at its inception, this book examines modern authority at the moment of its extraordinariness, when it was still tied to the creative energies of inspiration, to the revelatory powers that marked the awakening of a new age, an era and an ethos of Enlightenment.

European Physico-theology (1650-c.1760) in Context

European Physico-theology (1650-c.1760) in Context PDF

Author: Kaspar von Greyerz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0192679473

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Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward the recognition of God as Creator and to demonstrate the compatibility of the biblical record with the new science. It was a crucial, albeit often underestimated element in the intellectual as well as socio-cultural establishment of the new science in western and central Europe beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. The importance of physico-theology in enhancing the acceptance of the new science among a broad educated public cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, this insight has not yet received much attention in the history of early modern science, chiefly because the history of physico-theology tends to highlight the activities of virtuosi rather than well-known scientists. A contribution to the history of knowledge, this is the first monograph in English on physico-theology on the European scale. It concentrates on two genres, the argument from design, and the palaeontological argument regarding the role of the Deluge in the formation of fossils. It does so without neglecting practice (correspondence and collecting). It pays considerable attention to the historical context, above all to the new image of God as a wise, benevolent, rather than unpredictable being, which provided the practitioners of physico-theology (including clergy, physicians, lawyers, and philologists) with a new and powerful argument. It draws attention to the predominantly Protestant nature of the phenomenon and looks at the longevity of the argument from design in Britain and the Netherlands, where its demise came about as late as the first half of the nineteenth century.

Unacknowledged Legislators

Unacknowledged Legislators PDF

Author: Roger Pearson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 0198754477

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Unacknowledged Legislators presents an original and detailed history of the theory and practice of French poetry from 1750 through to the end of the Romantic period. Focusing on five major writers of the period, it demonstrates how the figure of the poet as lawgiver was central to the theory and practice of poetry during this period.

Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression

Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression PDF

Author: Susan McClary

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2013-03-04

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1442669519

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Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s. Essays from prominent historians, musicologists, and art critics examine methods of non-verbal cultural expression through the broad themes of time, motion, the body, and global relations. Together, they show that seventeenth-century cultural expression was more than just an embryonic stage within Western artistic development. Instead, the contributors argue that this period marks some of the most profound changes in European subjectivities.

Divine Fury

Divine Fury PDF

Author: Darrin McMahon

Publisher: Constellation

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0465003257

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Genius. With hints of madness and mystery, moral license and visionary force, the word suggests an almost otherworldly power: the power to create, to divine the secrets of the universe, even to destroy. Yet the notion of genius has been diluted in recent times. Today, rock stars, football coaches, and entrepreneurs are labeled ‘geniuses,’ and the word is applied so widely that it has obscured the sense of special election and superhuman authority that long accompanied it. As acclaimed historian Darrin M. McMahon explains, the concept of genius has roots in antiquity, when men of prodigious insight were thought to possess—or to be possessed by—demons and gods. Adapted in the centuries that followed and applied to a variety of religious figures, including prophets, apostles, sorcerers, and saints, abiding notions of transcendent human power were invoked at the time of the Renaissance to explain the miraculous creativity of men like Leonardo and Michelangelo. Yet it was only in the eighteenth century that the genius was truly born, idolized as a new model of the highest human type. Assuming prominence in figures as varied as Newton and Napoleon, the modern genius emerged in tension with a growing belief in human equality. Contesting the notion that all are created equal, geniuses served to dramatize the exception of extraordinary individuals not governed by ordinary laws. The phenomenon of genius drew scientific scrutiny and extensive public commentary into the 20th century, but it also drew religious and political longings that could be abused. In the genius cult of the Nazis and the outpouring of reverence for the redemptive figure of Einstein, genius achieved both its apotheosis and its Armageddon. The first comprehensive history of this elusive concept, Divine Fury follows the fortunes of genius and geniuses through the ages down to the present day, showing how—despite its many permutations and recent democratization—genius remains a potent force in our lives, reflecting modern needs, hopes, and fears.

Madness and the Romantic Poet

Madness and the Romantic Poet PDF

Author: James Whitehead

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0191053430

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Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?

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