Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics and the Novel

by Michael Prince

Overview

This book discusses the intersection between philosophy and literature during the British Enlightenment. Its primary focus is the work of moral philosophers during the first half of the eighteenth century, but its larger interest is in understanding how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel, and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521550628
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/16/1997
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought , #31
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: dialogue and Enlightenment; Part I. Strains of Enlightenment: 1. Shaftesbury's characteristic genres: concepts of criticism in the early eighteenth century; 2. Shaftesbury's The Moralists: a dialogue upon dialogue; 3. Berkeley and the paradoxes of empiricism: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous; 4. Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Christian Cicero; 5. Hume and the end of religious dialogue: Dialogues concerning Natural Religion; Part II. Dialogue, Aesthetics and the Novel: 6. The Platonic revival: 1740–70; 7. Anti-Platonism and the novelistic character; 8. Dead conversations: Richard Hurd's late poetics of dialogue; 9. Utopia or conversation: transforming dialogue in Johnson and Austen; Epilogue: some dialectics of Enlightenment.

Editorial Reviews

"[A] rich study."
International Journal of the Classical Tradition

From the Publisher