| Description |
1 online resource (259 pages) |
| Contents |
Introduction -- Chapter 1. Toward a Voluntarist Aesthetic -- Chapter 2. Glorious Arbitrariness: Science, Religion, and the Imagination of Infinite Variety -- Chapter 3. Energy and Structure: Remaking the Given in Blackmore and Pope -- Chapter 4. Embarrassed Invention: Stillingfleet, Locke, and the Style of Voluntarism -- Chapter 5. The Constructive Swift: Between the Hope and Fear of Decomposition -- Chapter 6. The Providence of Gathering and Scattering: Dynamic Variety in Defoe -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments |
| Summary |
Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of a seventeenth-century aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite, and embraced by English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe |
|
Unnerved by the upheavals of the seventeenth century, English writers including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe came to accept that disorder, rather than order, was the natural state of things. They were drawn to voluntarism, a theology that emphasized a willful creator and denied that nature embodied truth and beauty. Voluntarism, Wolfram Schmidgen contends, provided both theological framework and aesthetic license. In Infinite Variety, he reconstructs this voluntarist tradition of literary invention.Once one accepted that creation was willful and order arbitrary, Schmidgen argues, existing hierarchies of kind lost their normative value. Literary invention could be radicalized as a result. Acknowledging that the will drives creation, such writers as Blackmore and Locke inverted the rules of composition and let energy dominate structure, matter create form, and parts be valued over the whole. In literary, religious, and philosophical works, voluntarism authorized the move beyond the natural toward the deformed, the infinite, and the counterfactual.In reclaiming ontology as an explanatory context for literary invention, Infinite Variety offers a brilliantly learned analysis of an aesthetic framed not by the rise of secularism, but by its opposite. It is a book that articulates how religious belief shaped modern literary practices, including novelistic realism, and one that will be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship between literature, religion, and philosophy |
| Analysis |
Alexander Pope |
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British literature |
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Daniel Defoe |
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Eighteenth-century |
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Empiricism |
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John Locke |
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Jonathan Swift |
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Literary history |
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Nominalism |
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Richard Blackmore |
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Rise of the novel |
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Robert Boyle |
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Secularization |
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Thomas Hobbes |
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Voluntarism |
| Bibliography |
Includes biblipographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based upon print version of record |
| Subject |
English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
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Literary form -- History -- 18th century
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Order (Philosophy) in literature.
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Voluntarism -- History -- 18th century
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Religion and literature -- England -- History -- 18th century
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LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
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English literature
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Intellectual life
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Literary form
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Order (Philosophy) in literature
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Religion and literature
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Voluntarism
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| SUBJECT |
England -- Intellectual life -- History -- 18th century
|
| Subject |
England
|
| Genre/Form |
Literary criticism
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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Literary criticism.
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Critiques littéraires.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2021003509 |
| ISBN |
0812299906 |
|
9780812299908 |
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