How do we understand memory in the early novel? Departing from traditional empiricist conceptualizations of remembering, Mind over Matter uncovers a social model of memory in Enlightenment fiction that is fluid and evolving - one that has the capacity to alter personal histories. Memories are not merely imprints of first-hand experience stored in the mind, but composite stories transacted through dialogue and reading.Through new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and others, Sarah Eron tracks the fictional qualities of memory as a force that, much like the Romantic imagination, transposes time and alters forms. From Crusoe's island and Toby's bowling green to Evelina's garden and Fanny's east room, memory can alter, reconstitute, and even overcome the conditions of the physical environment. Memory shapes the process and outcome of the novel's imaginative world-making, drafting new realities to better endure trauma and crises. Bringing together philosophy of mind, formalism, and narrative theory, Eron highlights how eighteenth-century novelists explored remembering as a creative and curative force for literary characters and readers alike. If memory is where we fictionalize reality, fiction--and especially the novel--is where the truths of memory can be found.

Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment reconsiders theories of apostrophe and poetic authority to argue that the Augustan age created a new form of inspiration, one that not only changed the relationship of literary production to authority in the modern period but also crucially contributes to defining the movement of secularization in literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Seeking to redefine what we mean by secularization in the early stages of modernity, Eron argues that secularization's link to enthusiasm, or inspiration, often associated with Romanticism, begins in the imaginative literature of the early eighteenth century. If Romantic enthusiasm has been described through the rhetoric of transport, or "unworlding," then Augustan invocation appears more akin to a process of "worlding" in its central aim to appeal to the social other as a function of the eighteenth-century belief in a literary public sphere. By reformulating the passive structure of ancient invocation and subjecting it to the more dialogical methods of modern apostrophe and address, authors such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld formally revise inspiration in a way that generates a new and distinctive representation of the author. In this context, inspiration becomes a social gesture-an apostrophe to a friend or judging spectator or an allusion to the mental or aesthetic faculties of the author himself, his genius. Articulating this struggle toward modernity at its inception, this book examines modern authority at the moment of its extraordinariness, when it was still tied to the creative energies of inspiration, to the revelatory powers that marked the awakening of a new age, an era and an ethos of Enlightenment.

Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment reconsiders theories of apostrophe and poetic authority to argue that the Augustan age created a new form of inspiration, one that not only changed the relationship of literary production to authority in the modern period but that also crucially contributes to defining the movement of secularization in literature from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Usually considered the conservative counterparts to the Romantic project of secularizing religious enthusiasm, the Augustans are seen only in terms of negation: they remain a mere extension of seventeenth-century fury against enthusiastic discourse. This book disrupts and re-historicizes that literary lineage. By examining the formal mechanisms of invocation in Augustan literature, and by exploring a wider range of writers that extends beyond Swift and his vehement critique of enthusiasm, Eron charts a positive reform of enthusiasm as a species of the secular, which conforms to, instead of resisting, Enlightenment principles of the aesthetic; these call for a type of affect that promotes free reason and envisions the author's use of language as a process of discovery.Seeking to redefine what we mean by secularization in the early stages of the modern period, this book argues that secularization's link to enthusiasm, or inspiration, often associated with Romanticism, is an early eighteenth-century development. In using the term secular to characterize modern invocation, Eron considers Augustan inspiration not merely as a gesture towards the non-divine or non-metaphysical, but as a literary-rhetorical device that separates this world from the next insofar as it adopts the didactic, dialogic principles of an eighteenth-century public sphere. If Romantic enthusiasm has been described through the rhetoric of transport, or unworlding, then Augustan invocation appears more akin to a process of worlding in its central aims to appeal to the social other as a function of the eighteenth-century belief in a literary public sphere. This book makes a much-needed argument for the presence of a type of invocation in the Augustan age that aligns with early Enlightenment principles of the aesthetic and reveals definitions of genius and inspiration (hitherto unnoted in the eighteenth-century critical discourse) as formal agents of didacticism.

How do we understand memory in the early novel? Departing from traditional empiricist conceptualizations of remembering, Mind over Matter uncovers a social model of memory in Enlightenment fiction that is fluid and evolving - one that has the capacity to alter personal histories. Memories are not merely imprints of first-hand experience stored in the mind, but composite stories transacted through dialogue and reading.Through new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, and others, Sarah Eron tracks the fictional qualities of memory as a force that, much like the Romantic imagination, transposes time and alters forms. From Crusoe's island and Toby's bowling green to Evelina's garden and Fanny's east room, memory can alter, reconstitute, and even overcome the conditions of the physical environment. Memory shapes the process and outcome of the novel's imaginative world-making, drafting new realities to better endure trauma and crises. Bringing together philosophy of mind, formalism, and narrative theory, Eron highlights how eighteenth-century novelists explored remembering as a creative and curative force for literary characters and readers alike. If memory is where we fictionalize reality, fiction--and especially the novel--is where the truths of memory can be found.