The Soul's Imaginings: Daniel Defoe, William Cowper

PMLA ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Meyer Spacks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Complex Functions ◽  
Spiritual Autobiographies ◽  
Christian Fellowship

The authors of eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies and of their fictional imitations demonstrate the complex functions of imagination as a component of the spiritual life and of its records. Robinson Crusoe and William Cowper’s Memoir (1816) both delineate detailed sequences of emotional and imaginative development as the foundation of religious experience. Crusoe progresses to self-understanding by recognizing and mastering his own fear and anger and developing his capacity for love and by enlarging the resources of his imagination. Cowper asserts that his conversion and the Christian fellowship that followed it dominate his experience, but his account, with dark imagistic undertones, may also be read as revealing the persistence of despair. The unconscious shaping which produces this counter-pattern enriches the memoir’s implication. In novel and autobiography alike, the divergence between what the author asserts and what he suggests, reflecting varying possibilities of the imagination, can generate fruitful literary effects.

scholarly journals Human Spirituality: Jean-Louis Chrétien and the Vital Side of Speech

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 511
Author(s):  
Peruzzotti Francesca
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Points ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Human Spirituality

Jean-Louis Chrétien founded his phenomenological enquiry on an analysis of the word as defined by the call and response link. His analysis provides an in-depth approach to spiritual experience as a basis for authentic religious experience. The description of the theoretical sites in which he confronts the theme of the spirit (vital breath, Holy Spirit, inspiration of Scripture, and spiritual life and prayer) determines some fixed points that allow us to define spiritual experience as intersubjective and fleshly, and therefore, not reducible to solipsism and intimism.

The Market

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Self ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Market Institutions ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
The Right ◽  
Objective Existence

The market has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hardwired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements that allow people to recognize themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasized the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.

The First Globalization Debate: Crusoe vs. Gulliver

2011 ◽  
pp. 107-125
Author(s):  
Craufurd D. Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Gains From Trade ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Gulliver's Travels

Two of the earliest novels in English, Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, are widely perceived as an entertaining adventure story and a pioneering work of science fiction. Viewed by modern economists, however, they appear as expressions of opposing positions on the desirability of integration within a world economy. Crusoe demonstrated the gains from trade and colonization and the attendant social and political benefits. By contrast, Swift warned of complex entanglements that would arise from globalization, especially with foreign leaders who operated from theory and models rather than common sense.

scholarly journals La ermoza istorya de Robinzon o la mizerya: Sephardi Versions of Robinson Crusoe

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-232
Author(s):  
Marta Kacprzak
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
The 19Th Century

La ermoza istorya de Robinzon o la mizerya: Sephardi Versions of Robinson CrusoeIn the second half of the 19th century the Haskalah, an intellectual movement whose objective was to educate and westernize Eastern European Jews, also reached the Sephardic communities in the Ottoman Empire. As a result, there emerged Sephardic modern secular literature, represented mainly by narrative fiction, theatre plays and press. It should be added that modern Sephardic literature is primarily based on translations or adaptations of Western novels. Among these texts we find Sephardic editions of classics of European literature, such as Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.I have found four different versions of Robinson Crusoe that were written in Judeo-Spanish and edited in aljamía. Two of them were published serially in Sephardi press, one in Salonica in 1881 and the other in Constantinople in 1900. The other two editions were prepared by Ben Tsiyon Taragan and published as complete versions, the first one in Jerusalem in 1897 and the second one in Constantinople in 1924. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief analysis of the Sephardic adaptations of Robinson Crusoe by Taragan. La ermoza istorya de Robinzon o la mizerya: sefardyjska wersja Robinsona CrusoeHaskala, zwana także Żydowskim Oświeceniem, to ruch intelektualny, którego celem było odrodzenie kulturowe i społeczne Żydów z EuropyWschodniej oraz ich integracja ze środowiskiem lokalnym. W drugiej połowie XIX wieku Haskala objęła także społeczność Żydów sefardyjskich zamieszkujących tereny należące do Imperium Osmańskiego, w wyniku czego powstała współczesna, świecka literatura sefardyjska reprezentowana głównie przez prozę, sztuki teatralne oraz prasę. Warto dodać, że współczesna literatura sefardyjska oparta jest przede wszystkim na przekładach lub adaptacjach powieści uważanych za klasykę literatury europejskiej, takich jak Romeo i Julia Williama Szekspira, Robinson Crusoe Daniela Defoe czy Podróże Guliwera Jonathana Swifta.W trakcie prowadzonych przeze mnie badań natrafiłam na cztery różne judeo-hiszpańskie wersje Robinsona Crusoe, które zapisane zostały alfabetem hebrajskim, tzw. pismem Rasziego. Dwie z nich ukazały się w prasie sefardyjskiej, jako powieść w odcinkach, pierwsza w Salonikach w 1881 r., a druga w Konstantynopolu w 1900 r. Pozostałe dwie, autorstwa Ben Tsiyona Taragana, zostały wydane w całości, pierwsza w Jerozolimie w 1897 r., druga zaś w Konstantynopolu w 1924 r. Celem tego artykułu jest prezentacja oraz krótka analiza sefardyjskich adaptacji Robinsona Crusoe autorstwa B. T. Taragana.

scholarly journals El naufragio y la aventura intelectual: paralelismos significativos entre El Criticón y Robinson Crusoe

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Paola Encarnación Sandoval
Keyword(s):  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Baltasar Gracian

Este artículo estudia la relación entre el motivo del naufragio y el proceso de adquisición del lenguaje en El Criticón de Baltasar Gracián y Robinson Crusoe de Daniel Defoe. El argumento es que el naufragio se configura como un núcleo del relato propicio para desarrollar la aventura intelectual. El análisis de paralelismos entre estos textos, centrado en cuatro elementos —la intención edificante de las obras, el tratamiento del naufragio, el encuentro de los personajes y el proceso de adquisición del lenguaje—, revela una concepción peculiar de la aventura, en la cual el componente intelectual es importante para desarrollar el enfrentamiento de los personajes con sus realidades. El objetivo del estudio consiste en plantear una reflexión en torno a las inquietudes de estos autores sobre el conocimiento como parte de la aventura literaria.

‘Poor Protestant Flies’: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth Century England

1978 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roast Beef ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popish Plot

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

G. C. Lichtenberg: Dreams, Jokes, and the Unconscious in Eighteenth-Century Germany

1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Functional Link ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Dream Analysis ◽  
German Physicist

The German physicist and writer Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was well known during the nineteenth century as a humorist, thinker, and psychologist. He was also a favorite author of Freud, who read him beginning in his teens, quoted him frequently, and called him a “remarkable psychologist.” Despite this, he has been ignored by psychoanalysts and historians of psychiatry alike, and most of his writing is still unavailable in English. An introduction to Lichtenberg as a psychologist is provided, stressing material dealing with dream analysis, association theory, and drives. Relevant excerpts are translated into English. Lichtenberg is shown to have insisted upon the need for a systematic and rationalistic study of dreams, to have analyzed individual dreams (describing them as dramatized representations of thoughts, associations, and even conflicts from his own waking life), and to have emphasized the functional link between dreams and daydreams. His remarks on drives and commentary on eighteenth-century association theory represent a significant practical application, and thus refinement, of Enlightenment rationalistic psychology. These achievements are assessed in light of Freud's early fascination with him; it is argued that Lichtenberg is an example of the relevance of the historical and cultural background of psychoanalysis to clinical practice.

Demons, the Soul, and the Afterlife

2010 ◽  
pp. 194-209
Author(s):  
Sharon Flatto
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Central European ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Demonic

This chapter traces Ezekiel Landau's Prague works that incorporate kabbalistic teachings related to the soul, such as gilgul neshamot and ibur. It reviews Landau's Prague homilies and commentaries that are replete with kabbalistic concepts concerning demonic spirits and the afterlife. It also investigates writings, other Prague sources, and recent research on popular Jewish and non-Jewish culture in pre-modern Europe, which reveal that the Jews of Prague were obsessed with notions concerning the satanic realm, the soul, and the idea that invisible demons cause suffering. The chapter recounts how the themes on demons and the afterlife played a prominent role in the spiritual life and outlook of Prague Jews in numerous eighteenth-century eastern and central European communities. It discusses Landau's mythic and daring remarks concerning the soul and the demonic that predicated his mystical understanding of these entities.

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