Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700最新文献

5. Private Selves and Public Lives: Neoclassical Perspectives 5. 私人自我与公共生活:新古典主义观点

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-006

Inwardness

{"title":"5. Private Selves and Public Lives: Neoclassical Perspectives","authors":"Inwardness","doi":"10.1515/9783110691375-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-006","url":null,"abstract":"It is often claimed that modern concepts of individuality or the public sphere did not yet exist in the early modern period; or if they did, they looked and (probably) felt very different. There is a range of sociological and historical models and conceptual approaches to explain the emergence of a modern self-awareness of ‘individuals’ between 1300 and 1800 (see, for example, Greenblatt 1980; Taylor 1989; Mascuch 1996; Porter 1997). The problems begin with the word ‘individual’, which was not used in its modern meaning in the seventeenth century but may have “suggest[ed] a relation” rather than “a separate entity” (Stallybrass 1992, 606; see also Ferry 1983, 33–39). Similarly, the word ‘self’ was not used to denote the intrinsic, authentic, essential core of one human being (Ferry 1983, 39–45; Reiss 2003) and the word ‘subject’ did not mean an autonomous subject of decision and action but the subject as subditus, as subjected to the sovereign, sometimes contrasted to the ‘citizen’. Did the early moderns, then, not have a coherent and stable concept of selfhood or subjectivity? In contrast to this view, others emphasise “the conceptual importance of personal inwardness” (Maus 1995, 27; cf. Schoenfeldt 1999a, 11–13, 16–18). They focus on the textual traces of historically specific connections between concepts of privacy, inwardness, and personhood; they opt for a more pragmatic and limited analysis of the ways in which something like individuality becomes discernible in distinctions between inside and outside or between public and private spaces. From this vantage point, ‘subjectivity’ no longer appears as a (fairly) precise philosophical concept but as “a loose and varied collection of assumptions, intuitions, and practices that do not all logically entail one another and need not appear together at the same cultural moment” (Maus 1995, 29). That is to say that the imposition of a radical difference between modern and premodern forms of subjectivity (Barker 1984, Belsey 1985) can be as misguided as the assumption of continuity between them (Jagodzinski 1999b, 1–22). Continuities are almost inevitably evoked in conceptual histories that trace the semantic changes in words like ‘self’ and ‘individual’, too hastily assuming the existence of some entity to which the words are thought to refer. Conversely, the absence of a word in a certain period does not necessarily prove the non-existence of the concept in question. Inwardness, then, is less a concept than a cluster of “assumptions, intuitions, and practices” (Maus 1995, 29) which can be observed in different historical configurations. In this chapter, I present two case studies to explore how and why the distinction","PeriodicalId":122330,"journal":{"name":"Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116927038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Index 指数

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-009

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3. Writing, Reading, Seeing: Visuality and Contingency in the Literary Epistemology of Neoclassicism 3.写作、阅读、观看:新古典主义文学认识论中的可视性与偶然性

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-004

T. Browne, Christian Morals

{"title":"3. Writing, Reading, Seeing: Visuality and Contingency in the Literary Epistemology of Neoclassicism","authors":"T. Browne, Christian Morals","doi":"10.1515/9783110691375-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-004","url":null,"abstract":"Histories of literature sometimes present their object as if it were the hero of a nineteenth-century bildungsroman. According to this narrative, literature has become increasingly autonomous in modernity, expanding its degrees of freedom and operating according to its own rules. Aesthetic autonomy is then seen to be fully implemented in romantic and post-romantic literature in the nineteenth century. It is doubtful whether any such teleological construct can ever be an accurate description of historical processes, particularly considering the instability of ‘literature’ as an object. In many respects, one might argue that complete autonomy in the arts – such as the power of literature “to say everything, in every way” (Derrida 1992, 36) – has never been achieved and remains a utopia, another “unfinished project” of modernity (Habermas 1997). Are early modern developments merely the prehistory of an ‘autonomous’ literature? How are we to understand this? Traditionally, many literary histories locate decisive developments in the eighteenth century: together, these constitute the emergence of a modern framework in which literature works. There is no doubt that a number of important, or even essential, cultural achievements of the eighteenth century indeed depend on earlier developments; but I think it would be wrong simply to regard the seventeenth century as a mere way station towards something else or as","PeriodicalId":122330,"journal":{"name":"Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133852653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Preface to the Revised Edition 修订版序言

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-202

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The Augustan Angle: Civilised Contingency and Normative Discourse 奥古斯都的角度:文明的偶然性与规范话语

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-007

{"title":"The Augustan Angle: Civilised Contingency and Normative Discourse","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110691375-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-007","url":null,"abstract":"The readings of the last chapter have taken us to the threshold of the eighteenth century. By 1700, the neoclassical discourse of contingency and probability had been established as a coherent and dominant cultural programme as part of the general process of political and social consolidation in Britain. Towards the end of the century, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ implemented a constitutional form of monarchy and a liberal cultural ideology (Whiggism), including – for Protestants, at least – religious toleration. This created the preconditions for a crucial shift of balance between metaphysics, politics, and epistemology. The problems of reconciling their competing claims could now be solved – or at least ‘rationalised away’ – by funnelling the problematic experiential dimensions of reason, nature, and faith into the philosophical and moral terms of ‘common sense’ and ‘politeness’. The epistemological and political thinking of John Locke is exemplary in this respect. Locke’s empirical and practical rationalism allows for those dimensions of reality that, for Browne and others earlier in the century, had formed such a difficult, knotted complex – religion, politics, and secular (individual and social) frames of reference – to be disentangled. In contrast to Browne, Locke holds that the human faculties of perception are exactly matched to earthly requirements and that it is therefore meaningless to yearn for knowledge that transcends these faculties. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke remarks that “[t]he infinite wise Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our Senses, Faculties, and Organs, to the conveniences of Life, and the Business we have to do here” (2.23.12; 1979, 302). The tensions that had previously led to wars of religion are now relaxed by this deistic interpretation of the cosmos and its related view of natural rights, and these Lockean ideas have an impact on many other areas of human life. As portrayed in Congreve’s The Way of the World, the elite has become secular and self-supporting, self-reproducing, living according to its own laws. Secular problems are addressed by secular solutions. Although marriages still have to take place in a church, they are no longer made in heaven but on earth, based on mutual interests and agreements (the ‘proviso’) – not excluding, obviously, love, as passion and reason (Luhmann 1987). The books of the Puritans have their backs turned to this society, becoming objects of decoration on the mantelpiece in ironic reminiscence of the dii familiares. The competing claims of reason, nature, and faith are defused in the concepts of common sense and gentlemanly politeness. These terms and their implied rules now regulate civil conversation, including knowing where and when to stop or what not to talk about. As literature (in the sense of belles lettres) becomes a part of social conversation, it is increasingly bound by the rules of what is deemed acceptable, and its decorum","PeriodicalId":122330,"journal":{"name":"Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125814065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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List of Figures 数字一览表

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-204

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2. Literary Cabinets of Wonder: The ‘Paper Kingdomes’ of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne 2. 奇妙的文学橱柜:罗伯特·伯顿和托马斯·布朗爵士的“纸王国”

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-003

Sita Thomas, Browne

{"title":"2. Literary Cabinets of Wonder: The ‘Paper Kingdomes’ of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne","authors":"Sita Thomas, Browne","doi":"10.1515/9783110691375-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-003","url":null,"abstract":"The writings of Robert Burton (1577–1640) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) are usually discussed as canonic examples of early modern English non-fictional prose, but they are rarely read comparatively. Yet they share a number of characteristics that can make such a comparison meaningful. Under the influence of continental humanism, most notably the Erasmian ideal of copia and Montaigne’s introspective skepticism (see Cave 1979, Kahn 1985, Lobsien 1999), their texts are highly rhetorical and often playful. In Browne, such linguistic fireworks seem even to increase from one text to the next until they almost become the focus of attention. Their writings exceed any conventional boundaries of genre. What makes them highly literary are the ways in which they address and deal with the problem of the contingency of writing in the age of print. Their coping strategies, their literary epistemologies, are very different, almost contrary, and yet related. In Burton’s case, the problem of contingency leads to a quasi-theatrical staging of the author-image, accompanied by an overt distrust of the reader’s capacity for understanding. Browne’s solution, as we shall see, is the exploration of the new possibilities opened up by print culture. Both writers are transitional figures on the threshold of a new configuration of discourse. Burton can be seen as the culmination point of a long tradition of medieval and humanist literature, a copious compiler whose compulsive urge towards inflationary writing is incapable of stopping the erosion of the order of knowledge that he wishes to generate. Similarly, Browne’s writing no longer fits the mould of a late medieval, Aristotelian scholasticism. In spite of his “expansive curiosity” (Willey 1965, 42) and his familiarity with the scientific achievements of his time, he is no experimental scientist in the modern sense; when he performs an experiment, it is merely to replicate what others have tried before, and he would never be a member of the Royal Society. Among Browne’s “divided and distinguished worlds” (Browne 2012, 40, Religio 1.34) are allusions to Neoplatonic solar mysticism but also a professed belief in the geocentric world picture; a rather liberal understanding of religion combined with an unbroken belief in the existence of witches. Coleridge once described him as a “dramatic” rather than a “metaphysical” writer (Coleridge 1955, 438). Both are provincial figures: Burton as an Oxford theologian, Browne as a physician in Norwich. Both devote their lives to the almost perpetual writing and rewriting of a single gargantuan work of natural philosophy: in Burton’s case, the famous Anatomy of Melancholy (first ed. 1621, five subsequent editions 1623, 1628, 1632,","PeriodicalId":122330,"journal":{"name":"Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121950465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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List of Abbreviations 缩略语一览表

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-010

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4. Literature as Civil War 4. 作为内战的文学

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-005

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Frontmatter

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Pub Date : 2020-06-22 DOI: 10.1515/9783110691375-fm

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