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Unknowing Fanaticism - Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation (Paperback)
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Unknowing Fanaticism - Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation (Paperback)
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We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent
action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic,
from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable
one. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state
violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority.
Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical
religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature
to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern
politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasants' Revolt to
the English Civil War. The book traces two entangled approaches to
fanaticism in this long Reformation moment: the targeting of it as
an extreme political threat and the engagement with it as a deep
epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of
modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke
positioned themselves against fanaticism to pathologize rebellion
and abet theological and political control. In the second, which
arose alongside and often in response to the first, the poets of
fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical
self-annihilation-the process by which one could become a vessel
for divine violence-and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund
Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic's
claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to
know and depict the origins of fanaticism. Yet this crisis of
unknowing was a productive one. It led these writers to experiment
with poetic techniques that would allow them to address
fanaticism's tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human and
divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. These
poets demand a new critical method, which this book attempts to
model: a historically-minded and politicized formalism that can
attend to the complexity of the poetic encounter with fanaticism.
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