Philosophical dialogue in the British Enlightenment : theology, aesthetics, and the novel
- New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996
- xiv, 282 p. ; ill., 23 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-276) and index.
Publisher description: This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and it shows 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.
9780521021432
Aesthetics British 18th century Criticism interpretation English fiction Enlightenment Great Britain Intellectual life Philosophy in literature