Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Hawes, Clement.

Title Mania and literary style : the rhetoric of enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart / Clement Hawes
Published Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xii, 243 pages)
Series Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought ; 29
Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought ; 29.
Contents Introduction: mania as rhetoric -- pt. I. Defiant voice. 1. "Howle, you great ones": enthusiastic subjectivity as class rhetoric ; 2. "A huge loud voice": leveling and the gendered body politic ; 3. Strange acts and prophetic pranks: apocalypse as process in Abiezer Coppe -- pt. II. Patrician diagnosis. 4. Return to madness: mania as plebeian vapors in Swift -- pt. III. Beautiful liminality. 5. Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno ; 6. Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno ; 7. Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno ; 8. Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno -- Epilogue: beyond pathology
Summary This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Clement Hawes offers a counterweight to recent work which has addressed the subject of literature and madness from the viewpoint of contemporary psychological medicine, putting forward instead a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. He argues that the writings of dissident 'enthusiastic' groups are based in social antagonisms; and his account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude which persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Smart, Christopher, 1722-1771. Jubilate agno.
SUBJECT Smart, Christopher 1722-1771 Jubilate agno gnd
Englisch, ... gnd
Jubilate agno (Smart, Christopher) fast
Subject English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
Enthusiasm in literature.
Literature and mental illness -- England -- History -- 18th century
Literature and society -- England -- History -- 18th century
Rhetoric -- England -- History -- 18th century
English language -- 18th century -- Style
Levellers.
Ranters.
English language -- Style
English literature
Enthusiasm in literature
Levellers
Literature and mental illness
Literature and society
Ranters
Rhetoric
Ranters
Wahnsinn Motiv
Literatur
England
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 95013569
ISBN 9780511553486
051155348X