Mania and Literary Style

ISBN-13: 9780521550222 / Angielski / Twarda / 1996 / 256 str.

Clement Hawes

Opis

This highly original study of the "manic style" in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellows enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Its account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude that persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

Recenzje

"Clement Hawes's outstanding new book on the history of literary enthusiasm has arrived. Mania and Literary Style is a provocative and exciting account." Studies in Romanticism

Spis treści

Introduction: mania as rhetoric; Part I. Defiant Voice: 1. 'Howl, you great ones': enthusiastic subjectivity as class rhetoric; 2. 'A huge loud voice': leveling and the gendered body politic; 3. Strange acts and prophetic pranks: apocalypse as process in Abiezer Coppe; Part II. Patrician Diagnosis: 4. Return to madness: mania as plebeian vapors in Swift; Part III. Beautiful Liminality: 5. Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno; 6. Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno; 7. Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno; 8. Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno; Epilogue: beyond pathology.