Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2: Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain

The Enlightenment has been linked to some of the most powerfully destructive developments of modern life: imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitation, scientific absolutism, totalitarian rule; and behind these developments, the domination of facts over values, quantity over quality, the abstract over the concrete, reason over humanity, division over connection. In this two-volume collection of career-spanning essays, influential literary critic Michael McKeon argues a more complicated view by practicing a different way of doing history: imagining these oppositions as the product not of the Enlightenment but of modern experience in its maturity. These essays conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace-society, privacy, the public, the market, secularity, democracy, human rights, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. Volume 2 emphasizes the British Enlightenment's effects on the future rather than its break with the past. McKeon urges us to distinguish between those aspects of the Enlightenment that eventually were used to organize epistemic violence and oppression from those aspects that were-and remain today-revolutionary. Taken together, these two volumes present a formidable defense of the Enlightenment's liberating and ultimately transformative effects. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1          The Sciences as a Model for the Arts: A Synchronic Inquiry 2          From Ancient Mimesis to Modern Realism: A Diachronic Inquiry 3          The Historicity of Literary Conventions: Family Romance 4          The Historicity of Literary Genres: Pastoral Poetry 5          Political Poetry: Comparative Historicizing, 1650-1700, 1930-1980 6          Paradise Lost as Parody: Period, Genre, and Conjectural Interpretation Acknowledgments Source Notes Notes Index

About the Author :
MICHAEL MCKEON is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. He is the author of Politics and Poetry in Restoration England, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, and many articles, as well as the editor of Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach.

Review :
"The essays collected in these remarkable volumes offer a stirring defense of the revolutionary nature of early Enlightenment thought. McKeon reminds us-forcefully-just how much insight and reach can be achieved by an intellectual history as fearless and dialectical as his." - Wolfram Schmidgen (author of Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730) "Historicizing the Enlightenment adds to intellectual history’s customary mix of political, social, economic, and religious contexts a detailed analysis of literary works, period aesthetics, and cultural commentary. These two volumes will be essential reading for scholars across a number of fields." - April London (author of The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel) "Michael McKeon’s signal achievement as an intellectual historian and literary scholar is to capture the force of concepts in the making. His account of the Enlightenment is unparalleled in its depth and breadth." - Frances Ferguson (author of Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action) "With one party to the culture wars monumentalizing the dubious sides of imperialism and their opposition editing history to shame them, it is a welcome sign to see Michael McKeon returning to the history of the Enlightenment in order to use periodization ‘as a tool to think with.'" - Jonathan Lamb (author of Scurvy: The Disease of Recovery)