Passion’s Fictions

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-226
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Real Roots ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Character Criticism ◽  
The Mind

The final chapter consolidates the implications of the foregoing argument for the interpretation of early modern literature, in part by returning to the start of the story, in Shakespeare; but it approaches Shakespeare by way of an eighteenth-century phenomenon: the rise of works of “character criticism” represented for example by William Richardson’s essays. Eighteenth-century character criticism has long been seen as a new way of reading Shakespeare, even the intrusion of something foreign to Shakespeare’s plays. The word for that foreign element is often “psychology,” especially as allied to reading practices associated with the novel. This chapter argues that the real roots of character criticism lie in much older theories of the passions. The psychology at work is not nearly as new as has been claimed, as can be seen by contrasting Richardson’s essays with one of the books he cites: Edmund Burke’s treatise on the sublime and beautiful. The chapter then circles back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays already contain the elements of a psychology: an externalist psychology grounded in rhetoric and its account of the circumstantial mimesis of actions as an instrument of the knowledge of the passions. Shakespeare’s plays could become the material for a science of the passions because in some sense they already were: instances of a circumstantial knowledge of the passions produced according to principles first theorized by rhetoric, which themselves shaped the new sciences of the mind that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

scholarly journals Zentrifugen des Wissens – Zur Enzyklopädik des Barockromans

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas B. Kilcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Centrifugal Dispersion

AbstractEarly modern literature has high epistemological claims. In particular, the novel as the most innovative genre of the 16th and 17th centuries was expected to negotiate and transmit knowledge about the world in an extensive way. This epistemological optimism must be understood against the background of contemporary encyclopaedic models, which offered new possibilities of reaching out for universal and total knowledge. Two variants of encyclopaedic writing are most efficient for the novel: the logic of Lullism and the miscellaneous knowledge production of Polyhistorism. Both techniques were used in baroque novels of the 17th century: Polyhistorism produced a centrifugal dispersion of knowledge throughout the texts, whereas Lullism aimed at recollecting and ordering it. This interplay is evidently present in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s highly digressive 3,000 page novel „Arminius“ (1689/90), with its paratextual framework of prefaces, annotations, and indices. Moreover, the reception of „Arminius“ in 18th and 19th centuries is pertinent for the subsequent critique of encyclopaedic knowledge.

Readers and Reading Practices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Colclough
Keyword(s):  
Reading Aloud ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Illustrated Novel ◽  
The Mind

This chapter explores reading diaries to illustrate the bibliographic world in which individual readers encountered novels. From the recording of a baffled enjoyment of Tristram Shandy, through the conjuring up of the ‘excessive’ teenage delights taken in the illustrated novel, and on to the pleasures of dismissing emergent new genres as ‘too Highlandish’, the evidence presented here suggests just how much pleasure readers gained from novels. Readers engaged with fiction in a number of different forms during this time and textual context subtly altered the kind of reading that it was possible to produce. Similarly, anecdotal accounts of reading aloud recognizes reading as a material act, which brings the body as well as the mind into play. Moreover, it is worth remembering those everyday gestures of reading, such as hurrying to the library for the next volume, that were such an important part of the novel reader's experience during this period.

Emotions, Power and Popular Opinion about the Administration of Justice: The English Experience, from Coke’s ‘Artificial Reason’ to the Sensibility of ‘True Crime Stories’

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-90
Author(s):  
David Lemmings
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
The Common ◽  
True Crime

This article discusses emotions and power in the administration and representation of criminal justice in early modern England. In the early seventeenth century, professional lawyers insisted that only they were competent to understand the ‘artificial reason’ of the common law; and lay opinion was associated with unreliable emotional engagement with the protagonists in trials. ‘Popular jurisprudence’ received renewed impetus from the post-Reformation emphasis on conscience and divine providence, however, and this kind of common sense interpretation often featured in popular accounts of law proceedings. Moreover, the ‘low law’ administered at grass roots level by JPs was less professionalised because most magistrates were not lawyers. The development of popular and emotional jurisprudence is demonstrated in the eighteenth century by analysis of judges’ charges, popular novels, and the reportage of ‘true crime’. Ultimately, and despite further ‘lawyerisation’ of trials, this article argues that the rise of the novel and increased press reporting of criminal justice generated more vicarious engagement with the administration of justice. And this was emotional engagement: eighteenth-century popular jurisprudence represented justice as variously awesome, theatrical and unreasonably oppressive.

Turner: from sublime association to sublime energy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Ibata
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Pictorial Representation ◽  
British Art ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Artistic Medium ◽  
Major Figure ◽  
Radical Transformation

This final chapter concludes the study with another major figure of British art, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s lifelong ambition to emulate the powers of poetry is shown to have led him to provide one of the most adequate pictorial responses to the challenge initiated by Burke’s Enquiry. After examining the various channels through which eighteenth-century theories of the sublime reached Turner, the argument focuses on his radical transformation of the pictorial medium, as a means to overcome the mimetic limitations of visual representation and articulate the presentation of the unpresentable. His art is understood as the culmination of the reflection about the artistic medium which had been set in motion by the quest for the sublime, and by the growing awareness of inadequacies inherent to mimetic pictorial representation. It may be seen as the place where the aesthetics of the Enquiry were taken to their radical conclusion, leading to a resolute change of paradigms in visual representation.

Bunyan and Religious Allegory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Davies
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Narrative Methods ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter re-examines John Bunyan's religious allegories, and in particular The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), as works that complicate what might be thought of as novelistic habits of reading and writing. It seeks to approach them not simply as precursors to the novel but as radically different kinds of fiction. One might wish to treat Bunyan's allegories as ‘entertainment machines’ similar to other kinds of early modern literature, such as chivalric romance or the rogue biography, but they resist and arguably seek to reform ‘the fiction reading impulse’. To this degree, Bunyan's major allegorical works are sometimes like novels and at the same time nothing like them. Should Bunyan still hold a place in the history of the novel, it could be despite rather than because of the narrative methods he adopts.

Montaigne and Shakespeare

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Hamlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This article examines the history of critical efforts to trace the nature and extent of Shakespeare’s reliance upon Montaigne. Such efforts began in the late eighteenth century with the English scholar Edward Capell, and they have continued quite vigorously up to the present. In addition, the article raises a number of key cognate questions: What constitutes evidence in an investigation of this sort? When does verbal reliance amount to intellectual dependence? What do we stand to gain if we cease to look for relations of influence and focus instead on synchronic affinities between Montaigne and Shakespeare? Does Shakespeare exhibit resistance to Montaignian thought? And why do the potential links between these extraordinarily independent writers continue to fascinate scholars of early modern literature?

Narratives and Machines in Enlightenment Britain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Drury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Development ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The affinity between narratives and machines in the eighteenth century reflects the early modern effort to break down the traditional barriers separating the arts and sciences. Leading practitioners sought to establish the foundation of their arts in the sciences and natural philosophers transformed the sciences by incorporating the machines and techniques of artisans. Inspired by these developments, neoclassical critics sought to identify the fundamental mechanics of narrative. Like the machines used in other arts, the novel was understood to be a technical ‘invention’, recently imported from Europe, which needed to be rationalized for an enlightened nation. Once established on scientific principles, the novel could become a simulation device that produced useful knowledge of the principles underlying human behaviour. From these circumstances emerged one of the dominant technical codes of eighteenth-century fiction, a narrative of progress that extended the practical goals of the Industrial Enlightenment into the realm of individual moral development.

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