This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.

A critical evaluation of how theatre was assimilated to the interests of government by suppressing 'democratic' disorders associated with the stage.

An engaging account of how Shaftesbury revolutionized Western philosophy At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), developed the first comprehensive philosophy of beauty to be written in English. It revolutionized Western philosophy. In A Philosophy of Beauty, Michael Gill presents an engaging account of how Shaftesbury’s thought profoundly shaped modern ideas of nature, religion, morality, and art—and why, despite its long neglect, it remains compelling today. Before Shaftesbury’s magnum opus, Charactersticks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), it was common to see wilderness as ugly, to associate religion with fear and morality with unpleasant restriction, and to dismiss art as trivial or even corrupting. But Shaftesbury argued that nature, religion, virtue, and art can all be truly beautiful, and that cherishing and cultivating beauty is what makes life worth living. And, as Gill shows, this view had a huge impact on the development of natural religion, moral sense theory, aesthetics, and environmentalism. Combining captivating historical details and flashes of humor, A Philosophy of Beauty not only rediscovers and illuminates a fascinating philosopher but also offers an inspiring reflection about the role beauty can play in our lives.

This book offers the first account of the dead as an imagined community in the early nineteenth-century. It examines why Romantic and Victorian writers (including Wordsworth, Dickens, De Quincey, Godwin, and D’Israeli) believed that influencing the imaginative conception of the dead was a way to either advance, or resist, social and political reform. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the burgeoning field of Death Studies by drawing on the work of both canonical and lesser-known writers, reformers, and educationalists to show how both literary representation of the dead, and the burial and display of their corpses in churchyards, dissecting-rooms, and garden cemeteries, responded to developments in literary aesthetics, psychology, ethics, and political philosophy. Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790-1848 shows that whether they were lauded as exemplars or loathed as tyrants, rendered absent by burial, or made uncannily present through exhumation and display, the dead were central to debates about the shape and structure of British society as it underwent some of the most radical transformations in its history.

This book traces the historical relationship between male-male erotic desire and the genre of literary or philosophical dialogue. It describes three literary-philosophical traditions, each of which originates in a different Platonic dialogue whose subsequent influence can be traced, first, through the Roman and medieval periods; second, through the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods; and, finally, through the modern and postmodern periods. Sturges demonstrates that various forms of erotic deviance have been differently valued in these different periods and cultures, and that dialogue has consistently proven to be the genre of choice for expressing these changing values. This study provides a valuable historical perspective on current debates over the place of homosexuality in modern Western culture.

Brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis to read 18th-century British philosophy in its historical context. This work analyses how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed their writing; and, how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness.

This volume completes Isabel Rivers' widely acclaimed exploration of the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. She investigates the effect of attempts to separate ethics from religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. Focusing on moral philosophy and the educational institutions in which (or in spite of which) these ideas were developed, the book pays close attention to the movement of ideas through the British Isles, in particular the spread of Shaftesbury's thought from England to Ireland and Scotland, and the varied reception of Hume's scepticism north and south of the border. It also demonstrates the enormous influence of Shaftesbury's moral thought and the ultimate triumph of the English interpretation of Shaftesbury with the rise of Butler. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this volume makes a vital contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century thought.

"One of many writers inspired by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the German novelist Jean Paul Richter coined the term 'Shandean humour' in his work of aesthetic theory. The essays in this volume investigate how Sterne's humour functions, the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what role it played in identity-construction and in the representation of melancholy. In tracing its hitherto under-recognised impact both on literary writers, such as Jean Paul and Herman Melville, and on philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, the collection reveals that Shandean humour is a Grenzganger - a point of commerce not only between Anglophone and German discourses, but also between literature and philosophy. Klaus Vieweg is Professor of Philosophy at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena; James Vigus is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of English and American Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Kathleen M. Wheeler is Reader in English Literature at the University of Cambridge."

The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 offers readers discussions of the entire range of literary expression from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. In essays by thirty distinguished scholars, recent historical perspectives and new critical approaches and methods are brought to bear on the classic authors and texts of the period. Forgotten or neglected authors and themes as well as new and emerging genres within the expanding marketplace for printed matter during the eighteenth century receive special attention and emphasis. The volume's guiding purpose is to examine the social and historical circumstances within which literary production and imaginative writing take place in the period and to evaluate the enduring verbal complexity and cultural insights they articulate so powerfully.

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.