Great Expectations: Futurity in the Long Eighteenth Century

ISBN-13: 9783631620076 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 303 str.

Mascha Hansen; Juergen Klein

Opis

What did eighteenth-century men and women think about when they contemplated the future? What was hidden in the -dark bosom of futurity-, as Richardson s Pamela calls it? Do all types of literature that supply a critique of the present conjure up an idealized past or a vision of a better future? Predictions and prophecies not only astrological but also political ones, utopian models, theological concepts like predestination, progress in the sciences, and, last but not least, life-after-death, both in the form of secular fame and the immortal soul, are among the topics addressed by the essays collected in this volume."

Spis treści

Inhalt: Mascha Hansen: Introduction - Kevin L. Cope: Miracle versus Mayhem: Disturbances of the Future in a Long Eighteenth Century That Thought It Might Be Short - Hermann J. Real: 'Not in Utopia, Subterranean Fields, Heaven Knows Where': or, Apocalypse When? - Patrick Müller: Rewriting the Divine-Right Theory for the Whigs: The Political Implications of Shaftesbury's Treatment of the Doctrine of Futurity in his Characteristicks - Norbert Col: Edmund Burke, Futurity and Providence - Bärbel Czennia: The Futurity of Fame: Eighteenth-Century Paths to Immortality - Allan Ingram: 'Suppose me dead; and then suppose ...': Swift in Lively Anticipation - Bill Overton: Lord Hervey, Death and Futurity - Mascha Hansen: Great Expectations? Plans and Planning in Women's Memoirs - Katherine Aske: 'He at first sight cou'd each Ones Fortune tell': Physiognomy and Fortune-Telling in the Early to Mid-Eighteenth Century - Sara Read: 'Only Kept Up by the Credulous and Ignorant': Eighteenth-Century Responses to the Ancient Beliefs about Menstrual Blood - Hélène Dachez: 'Let me collect myself, and pursue my journey': Generation in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy - Michael Szczekalla: The Critique of Utopianism: Gibbon vs. Godwin - Jürgen Klein: 'The Forty-Five': British Modernisation and the First Glimpses of the End of the Historical Chronotope - Stefanie Schult: 'Old lamps for new': The Rise of the Oriental Tale in the Eighteenth Century and Its Influence on English Literature and Culture - Gerald J. Butler: Our Own Service in the Empire Pope's Dunciad Predicts.

O autorze

Jürgen Klein, Greifswald University (Germany), is Emeritus Chair of English Literature and British Intellectual and Cultural History. Publications in the fields: English and comparative literature, English and European intellectual history, literary theory. Editor of Flandziu: Halbjahresschrift für Literatur der Moderne. Recently published by Peter Lang: England und der Kontinent (2008).
Mascha Hansen is currently research assistant (PostDoc) at Greifswald University. She has published a monograph on Frances Burney (Frances Burney and the Female Bildungsroman, Lang 2004) and several essays on eighteenth-century women writers.