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Unfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British
Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long
considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent
insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that
only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects
including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness,
and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of
imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the
period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of
Unfelt—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political
economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the
long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of
sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and
Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith,
Noggle's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the
scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing
inspiration from contemporary affect theory, Noggle charts how
feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other,
identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful:
the potential, the incipient, the emergent, the virtual.
Unfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British
Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long
considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent
insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that
only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects
including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness,
and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of
imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the
period's understanding of sensibility. Each of the four sections of
Unfelt—on philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political
economy—charts the development of these idioms from early in the
long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of
sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and
Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith,
Noggle's exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the
scope of affect in the period's writing and thought. Drawing
inspiration from contemporary affect theory, Noggle charts how
feeling and unfeeling flow and feed back into each other,
identifying emotional dynamics at their most elusive and powerful:
the potential, the incipient, the emergent, the virtual.
Is taste a quick, momentary experience in the individual mind? Or
something durable, shaped by slow, historical processes, affecting
groups of people at different times and places? British writers in
the eighteenth century believed that it was both, and the tension
between these temporal poles shaped the meaning of taste in the
period and set a course for aesthetics in following centuries.
Focusing on works in many genres-Alexander Pope's poems, David
Hume's historiography, essays by Hannah More and Anna Barbauld, and
novels by Frances Burney and William Beckford-this book sees the
divided temporality of taste as an unpredictable force in British
writing. The eighteenth century was the age of taste. Writers
considered its intense effects on individual minds as especially
characteristic of the collective present of British modernity,
whilst they also recognized the disturbing tendency of taste's
immediacy and its historical roles to interrupt and foreclose on
each other. While noting how taste's two temporal flavours may be
made to agree in order to consolidate various national, social, and
gendered identities, this book also demonstrates that taste's dual
temporality makes it more disruptive than scholars usually think.
As such, taste models a kind of critical practice that this book
itself endeavours to inherit: the insistent testing of the moment
of discernment and on-going patterns of thinking and feeling
against each other.
This book examines the role of scepticism in initiating the idea of the sublime in early modern British literature. James Noggle draws on philosophy, intellectual history, and critical theory to illuminate the aesthetic ideology of Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester among other important writers of the period. The Skeptical Sublime compares the view of sublimity presented by these authors with that of the dominant, liberal tradition of eighteenth-century criticism to offer a new understanding of how these writers helped construct proto-aesthetic categories that stabilized British culture after years of civil war and revolution, while at the same time their scepticism allowed them to express ambivalence about the emerging social order.
During the last half of the eighteenth century, sensibility and its
less celebrated corollary sense were subject to constant variation,
critique, and contestation in ways that raise profound questions
about the formation of moral identities and communities. Beyond
Sense and Sensibility addresses those questions. What authority
does reason retain as a moral faculty in an age of sensibility? How
reliable or desirable is feeling as a moral guide or a test of
character? How does such a focus contribute to moral isolation and
elitism or, conversely, social connectedness and inclusion? How can
we distinguish between that connectedness and a disciplinary
socialization? How do insensible processes contribute to our moral
formation and action? What alternatives lie beyond the
anthropomorphism implied by sense and sensibility? Drawing
extensively on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as
well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first
century, this volume of essays examines moral formation represented
in or implicitly produced by a range of texts, including Boswell's
literary criticism, Fergusson's poetry, Burney's novels,
Doddridge's biography, Smollett's novels, Charlotte Smith's
children's books, Johnson's essays, Gibbon's history, and
Wordsworth's poetry. The distinctive conceptual and textual breadth
of Beyond Sense and Sensibility yields a rich reassessment and
augmentation of the two perspectives summarized by the terms sense
and sensibility in later eighteenth-century Britain.
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Paperback
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R398
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Discovery Miles 3 300
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