Enlightenment

About: Enlightenment is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6845 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116832 citations.

Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: Plots of Enlightenment explores the emergence of the English novel during the early 1700s as a preeminent form of popular education at a time when educators were defining a new kind of "modern" English citizenship for both men and women. This new individual was imagined neither as the free, self-determined figure of early modern liberalism or republicanism, nor, at the other extreme, as the product of a nearly totalized disciplinary regimen. Instead, this new citizen materialized from the tensile process of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "regulated improvisation," a strategy of performed individual identity that combines both social orchestration and individual agency. This book considers how the period's diverse forms of educational writing (including chapbooks, conduct books, and philosophical treatises) and the most innovative educational institutions of the age (such as charity schools, working schools, and proposed academies for young women) produced a shared concept of improvised identity also shaped by the early novel's pedagogical agenda. The model of improvised subjectivity contributed to new ways of imagining English individuality as both a private and public entity; it also empowered women authors, both educators and novelists, to transform traditional ideals of femininity in forming their own protofeminist versions of enlightened female identity. While offering a comprehensive account of the novel's educational status during the Enlightenment, Plots of Enlightenment focuses particularly on the first half of the eighteenth century, when novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox were first exploring concepts of fictional character based on educational and moral improvisation. A close examination of these authors' work illustrates further that by the 1750s, the improvisational impulse in England had forged the first perceptible outlines of the fictional subgenre later called the novel of education or the Bildungsroman. This book is the first study of its kind to account for the complex interplay between the individualist and collectivist protocols of early modern fiction, with an eye toward articulating a comprehensive description of socialization and literary form that can accommodate the similarities and differences in the works of both male and female writers.

Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto

Abstract: Medieval views of matter have traditionally been left out of discussions of materialism, in part because philosophers and historians of science have considered them to be too "metaphysical" in orientation. Materialism has therefore been defined univocally in terms of the definitions of matter in vogue during the Enlightenment (primarily physicalism and Cartesian dualism). The effects of this omission are still felt in the materialist paradigms that continue to underwrite much work in literary criticism, history, and other humanist disciplines. This article argues that our modern understanding of materialism would be usefully widened by admitting that medieval definitions of matter, both hylomorphic and humoral, constitute their own versions of "materialism," versions that can help us to historicize later understandings of the term. Finally, medieval poetics would play a significant role in such a recuperative project, since late medieval natural philosophy and literary practice shared similar repr...

The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture

Abstract: This text explores the early Jewish confrontations with modernity and burgeoning 18th-century interest in the study of Scripture, Edward Breuer examines the complex relationship between the Jewish Enlightenment and the German "Aufklarung". The revival of a textual and linguistic approach to Bible study among Jews, exemplified by the new translation and commentary published by Moses Mendelssohn, was largely reflective of the aesthetic and literary concerns of contemporary Europeans. "The Limits of Enlightenment" demonstrates that this revival was also informed by an acute awareness of critical European scholarship and an attempt to respond to its modern challenges. Alongside its openness to European society and culture, the German-Jewish Enlightenment was thus also shaped by a newly perceived need to defend centuries of Jewish learning and tradition.