Historicizing the enlightenment. Volume 2. : literature, the arts, and the aesthetic in Britain / Michael McKeon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKeon, Michael, 1943- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enlightenment--Great Britain.

Enlightenment.

Great Britain--Civilization--18th century.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--Intellectual life--18th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (268 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg, PA : Bucknell University Press, [2023]

Summary:

Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead "neoclassicism" and "Augustanism" have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of "imitation" as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes--"counter-," "mock-," "anti-," "neo-"--that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory "novel tradition"--realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism--whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Contents:

Cover

Frontispiece

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

(Neo)classic and Romantic

The Radical Break

Imitation and Expression, the Mirror and the Lamp

"Revolution"

Preromanticism

Modernism: Structuralism and Poststructuralism

"Rules" and the Genre System

The Novel Tradition

1. The Sciences as a Model for the Arts: A Synchronic Inquiry

Ancients and Moderns, Arts and Sciences

Experience and Experiment

Controlling for Time, Place, and Persons: The TwoUnities

Controlling for Time, Place, and Persons: The Dramatic Aesthetic

The New Principle of Pleasure

The Judgment of Aesthetic Value

The Aesthetic Imagination and the Origins of the Social Sciences

Controlling for Time, Place, and Persons: The Narrative Claim to Historicity

Novelistic Plots as Experimental Hypotheses

Controlling for Time, Place, and Persons: The Novel Aesthetic, or Realism

2. From Ancient Mimesis to Modern Realism: A Diachronic Inquiry

Aristotelian Mimesis

Verisimilitude: Italian Theory

Verisimilitude: French Theory

Probability: English Theory

Realism

The Rise of Fictionality?

3. The Historicity of Literary Conventions: Family Romance

The History of a Convention?

Literary Convention as Social Convention

Family Romance as Ideology

True Nobility in the Service of Patrilineal Nobility

True Nobility as Female

True Nobility as Puritan

Novelistic Parody of Patrilineal Nobility

Discovery Within

Conclusion

4. The Historicity of Literary Genres: Pastoral Poetry

What Is Pastoral?

Pastoral and Periodization

Capitalism Began in the Countryside

From Forms to Fetters?

Pastoral Poetry: Changing Places

Retreat

Locational Pastoral

Taking the Measure of the City

Renaissance Pastoral Parodied

Explicit Critique of the Pastoral Tradition.

Object as Subject: Laboring Pastoral

Women's Pastoral

Pastoral Internalized: Micro-pastoral

Pastoral Externalized: Macro-pastoral

The North-South Axis

The East-West Axis

5. Political Poetry: Comparative Historicizing, 1650-1700, 1930-1980

The Modern Problemof Political Poetry

Politics as Form

Tradition: The Tacit Distinction of Politics and Poetry

State Poetry: The Enlightenment Emergence of "Political Poetry"

A Model: Religious Poetry and "Religious Poetry"

6. Paradise Lost as Parody: Period, Genre, and Conjectural Interpretation

Parody

Mock Epic

Christian Typology

Christian Accommodation

Domestication

Heroic Poetry

Secret History

Obviating Accommodation, Forgoing Domestication, Precluding Allegory

The Novel

Acknowledgments

Notes

Source Notes

Index

About the Author.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

ISBN:

1-68448-477-4

1-68448-478-2