scholarly journals As "Men of Sense": Godwin, Baroja, Bateson and Hume's "Of National Characters"

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (34) ◽  
pp. 159-182
Author(s):  
Emilio Mazza
Keyword(s):  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
National Character ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
National Differences

Men of sense, Hume says, condemn the extreme undistinguishing judgments concerning national characters; yet, he adds, they also allow that each nation has a national character or a peculiar set of resembling manners. Hume's "Of national characters" was published at the end of 1748 in unclear circumstances, but it is still the object of several discussions for different reasons. William Godwin, Julio Caro Baroja and Gregory Bateson seem to refer to it, even though only the first two acknowledge it. Godwin uses it as a weapon to attack the climatic theory in the service of tyranny; Baroja as a sceptical solvent to destroy all mythical national character and real national prejudice; Bateson as a model to delineate an abstract frame for the research on national differences. Since, as Hume warns us, we run with avidity to give our evidence to what flatters our national prejudices and, as Mary Wollstonecraft denounces, we are eager to give a national character to every people, "Of National Characters" still provides us with acute and instructive remarks: to speak of national characters does not necessarily means that we are speaking in favour of nationalism and against the individuals.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ◽  
Story Writing

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceived of the central idea for Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus—most often referred to simply as Frankenstein—during the summer of 1816 while vacationing on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is her first and most famous novel. Although the assertion is debatable, some scholars have argued that Frankenstein is the first work of modern science fiction. Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein in response to a “ghost story” writing contest between herself, Percy Shelley, Percy Shelley’s physician and friend John Polidori, and Lord Byron, who were trapped indoors reading German ghost stories as the result of inclement weather. Polidori’s contribution to this contest, “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819), influenced the development of Gothic literature. According to Shelley, she drew inspiration from a nightmare she had, which she attributed to discussions she overheard between Percy and Byron regarding experiments with electricity and animation. Shelley began working on the novel when she returned home to England in September, and the book’s first edition was published anonymously in 1818. Shelley’s father William Godwin made minor revisions for a second edition in 1821; and Shelley herself made more substantial changes for the third edition in 1831. The story is told through an epistolary frame, and follows Victor Frankenstein, a university student of the “unhallowed arts” who assembles, animates, and abandons an unnamed human-like creature. The creature goes on to haunt his creator both literally and metaphorically. Over the past two hundred years, the story has been widely influential, and re-interpreted in various forms of culture and media. In literary studies, scholars have discussed which edition of the text is the “truest” to Mary Shelley’s intended vision. The novel has been analyzed for its messages about human pride and hubris, the pursuit of knowledge, the nature/nurture question, as put forth by Rousseau, ethical questions in medicine and science, and family, gender, and reproduction, among other topics.

scholarly journals A ciência monstruosa em 'Frankenstein': aspectos do pós-humano

Gragoatá ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (47) ◽  
pp. 848
Author(s):  
Anderson Soares Gomes
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Luigi Galvani ◽  
Erasmus Darwin

Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar de que maneira as descobertas e o pensamento científico do final do século XVIII e início do século XIX (período conhecido como Segunda Revolução Científica) influenciaram a escrita do romance Frankenstein (1818), de Mary Shelley, assim como analisar como essa obra apresenta aspectos que contribuem para o estudo do pós-humano. Frankenstein foi escrito em meio a um contexto de profundas revoluções no pensamento filosófico-científico que informaram diversos elementos presentes no romance: as teorias sociais de William Godwin e Mary Wollstonecraft, as hipóteses sobre o princípio da vida de Erasmus Darwin, os experimentos com eletricidade de Luigi Galvani, entre outros. Por outro lado, em uma perspectiva contemporânea, Frankenstein é uma obra que inaugura vários aspectos que viriam a ser lidos pelo prisma do pós-humano. Ao descrever as possíveis (e terríveis) consequências da junção da esfera do humano com as do animal e do tecnológico, o romance problematiza a posição privilegiada do homem na natureza. Considerando as características físicas e biológicas do monstro, o desejo de Frankenstein em ultrapassar os limites da natureza, e a complexa relação de ambos os personagens no que se refere ao binômio desejo/liberdade, o romance pode ser lido como um dos grandes representantes do conceito de pós-humanidade na literatura.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Shauna Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social System ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Conflicting Goals

This essay on the novel of ideas in the 1790s investigates the sometimes conflicting goals pursue by the ‘Jacobin’ novelists—figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays—and also charts their characteristic preoccupations with the proper relations between reason and passion and mind and body. Revamping the Enlightenment tradition of the conte philosophique, these supporters of the Revolution in France and political reform in Britain advocated a newly ambitious species of novel capable of building bridges between the discursive domains of fiction and political theory. These novelists also set out to claim the power over readers’ emotions they found in sentimental fiction’s stories of suffering individuals. At the same time, contrariwise, they aimed to assemble comprehensive accounts of the social system—of ‘things as they are’, in Godwin’s phrase—and touted their commitment to the promulgation of universal, impersonal truth.

The Labours of History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Sophia Lee ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document