Believing and Unbelieving in the Dunciad

2019 ◽  
pp. 211-227
Author(s):  
Sophie Gee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
External World ◽  
Material World ◽  
Religion And Theology ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Unstable Position

In The Dunciad in Four Books Pope aimed his satire at the literary and intellectual world of eighteenth-century London, and especially its scholars, editors, and publishers. But Pope’s satire is also directed against contemporary developments in religion and theology. This chapter argues that Pope attacks fashionable ideas about the nature of God and the material world in The Dunciad as a way to explore his own ideas about the complex, often-paradoxical nature of imaginative fiction. Through allusions to the religious debates of his day, Pope encourages readers to link theological anxieties about the individual’s relationship to unseen truth with conceptual uncertainties about the power of literary fictions; to see that fiction, like religion, mediated between unknowable human interiority and the visible external world, and thus occupied an ambiguous, unstable position in relation to empirical phenomena.

scholarly journals Wackenroder and the Doctrine of the Soul

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Kevin O'Regan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
External World ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Classical Philosophy ◽  
Heinrich Wackenroder

The writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) constitute perhaps the most powerful and original source in the early German Romantic discourse on autonomous music, itself a spearhead of a European trend that matured at he turn of the eighteenth century. Wackenroder's perfervid yet strangely lucid and insightful observations on art and music are founded on the notion ofKunstreligion(‘art religion’), which he uses to replace the rational explanations of art, based on knowledge and representation of the external world, and derived from classical philosophy.

God & the Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Material World ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

God and the Gothic undertakes a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, now seen as usurpation of power by the authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part I interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe’s melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part II traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In Part III, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in Part IV, nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost-story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restores the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

scholarly journals Thomas Jones’ Neapolitan Kitchen: The Material Cultures of Food on the Grand Tour

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-102
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Material World ◽  
Time Capsule ◽  
The City

Abstract The Welsh painter, Thomas Jones, recorded in minute detail the prices, origin, and types of food and services for each day of his family’s stay in Naples from their arrival from Rome in 1780 to their departure for England in 1783. His “Italian account book” has not been studied before in any depth, except in relation to his activities as an artist. However, this “time-capsule” of a Grand Tour household provides an extraordinarily vivid entry into the material world of urban provisioning in one of the largest cities in eighteenth-century Europe, by linking the economy of the street to wider networks of provisioning from outside of the city. It also provides a better understanding of the extent of acculturation of British residents in Italy. Space, time, and the interconnectedness between the home and the street are central themes in this material culture analysis of food on the Grand Tour.

scholarly journals A Vietnamese Reading of the Master’s Classic: Pha .m Nguyê ˜n Du’s Humble Comments on the Analects as an Example of Transformative Learning

Asian Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-199
Author(s):  
Nam NGUYEN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Analects ◽  
Contemporary Education ◽  
Original Reading

Phạm Nguyễn Du’s influential text Humble Comments on the Analects (Luận Ngữ Ngu Án 論語愚按) is an outstanding example of a Vietnamese adaptation and reworking of an East Asian intellectual tradition. In organizing his work, Phạm departed from convention by rearranging the extant chapters of the Analects into four “books”: “Sage” (Thánh 聖), “Learning” (Học 學), “Official” (Sĩ 仕), and “Politics” (Chính 政). Moreover, Phạm placed particular emphasis on the “Learning” book, and thus underscored his contention that the classic text was especially relevant and meaningful to eighteenth-century Vietnam. This paper attempts to read Phạm’s work in the contexts of both Confucian tradition and contemporary education. First, it examines Phạm’s composition of the Humble Comments based on Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning. Phạm’s writing process in this work presents a fascinating case of transformative learning, in which the author questions received assumptions about the world and himself, puts forward new propositions, and elaborates these via an original reading of a classic. Through the analysis of Phạm Nguyễn Du’s life and his preface to the Humble Comments, one can also gain a better view of the Vietnamese reception of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, and more particularly, of Zhu’s dictum of “learning for the sake of one’s self” (weiji zhi xue 為己 之學). Lastly, this dictum will be reappraised to show its validity in contemporary educational contexts.

Buffier, Claude (1661–1737)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Manns
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
External World ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
External Reality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy

A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, he saw their reliance on the testimony of inner experience to be conducive to scepticism concerning the external world. In reaction to this, he sought to establish the irrevocable claims of various ‘first truths’, which pointed towards external reality and qualified it in various respects. His work anticipates certain themes that surfaced later in the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid.

Bodily sensations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.G.F. Martin
Keyword(s):  
External World ◽  
The State ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Material World ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Bodily Sensations ◽  
The Mind

Bodily sensations are those feelings, or sensory experiences, most intimately associated with one’s body: aches, tickles; feelings of pain and pleasure, of warmth, of fatigue. Many philosophers contrast bodily sensations with perceptions of the external world, claiming that sensations provide one with awareness of nothing independent of them. An alternative approach is to take sensations to be a form of awareness of one’s body – on one view sensations are simply the perception of the state and properties of one’s body. Bodily sensations have been seen as a major problem for any attempt to give an account of the mind that takes it to be part of the material world as investigated by the physical sciences.

Gentle Labour: Jesuit Georgic in the Age of Louis XIV

Loyola's Bees ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Annabel Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Classical Style

René Rapin, the father of Jesuit georgic poetry, manoeuvred his intellectual life between the ancients and the moderns with an instinct for conciliation and compromise that made him an effective apostle to the world. He is best remembered for his Horti, a classical-style didactic poem in four books that celebrated the victory of the moderns over the ancients in horticultural art. His poem, which is secular in appearance, is motivated by (mildly concealed) religion and Jesuito-political impulses, and cultural and literary impulses, particularly those of Virgil. This chapter discusses some of the developments in the Italian Renaissance georgic poetry to better understand Rapin's contribution to the early modern Latin georgic. It considers the latter Latin poems on horticulture and sericulture, which bear resemblance to the ancient model yet are considerably shorter than Virgil's. These latter georgic poems predicated on a Nature that is mild and marvellous, and centred on the artistic manipulation of Nature. In the Italian Renaissance, the ‘recreational georgics’ were dominated by pastoral ease, which is ironic, given the prominent thematic of labour in the original georgics. While the georgics were poems that celebrated nature and labour in gardens, by the turn of the eighteenth century, French Jesuits had identified the didactic genre of georgics as a flexible medium for exhibiting their modern Latinity and advertising their honnêteté.

Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition: Tracing Power, Slavery, and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Portuguese Atlantic

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 460-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Fromont
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Material World ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract In 1730, the Inquisition of Lisbon arrested José Francisco Pereira, a man raised in West Africa and enslaved in Brazil then Portugal, who had learned along his transatlantic journeys the art of making amulets known in the eighteenth century Portuguese-speaking world as bolsas de mandinga. Mixing European esoteric material into objects of Afro-Atlantic agency, bolsa-makers such as José Francisco created objects of trustworthy might that brought empowerment and security of body and mind to a diverse clientele. The bolsas, as well as similar empowered objects created in Atlantic Africa reveal the deep and mutually transformative spiritual and material connections that the slave trade engendered between Europeans and Africans in the early modern period. Common concerns produced similar answers, not least newly defined or redefined notions of witchcraft and fetish and, more broadly, conceptions about the nature of power and its multivalent entanglements with the material world.

White Legend Against Black: Nationalism and Enlightenment in a Spanish Context

1977 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Paul J. Hauben
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Subject

The appearance of no less than four books in English marked 1971 as a banner year for Black Legend studies, especially for their colonial side. As in the past discussion emphasized the sixteenth century, dominated by the commanding and controversial Dominican, Bartolomé de Las Casas on one hand, and the grim Indian demographic catastrophe on the other. This was no less so during the Enlightenment's passionate debates on the subject. Modern research gives greater credence to mortality rates suggested by Las Casas, but centers on the dire effects of disease as the main agent causing mass death. As this essay will suggest, eighteenth century discussants were somewhat betwixt and between concerning the American experience and the Hispanic impact. Clearly much of the ongoing appeal of Las Casas' interpretation of the Indians' calamity, which stressed the conquerors' brutality, comes from its foreshadowing of modern agonies over race relations and western treatment of other colonialized peoples.

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