Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel : Fielding to Austen (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Maioli, Roger

Springer International Publishing AG（2018/07発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 202 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9783319819815
• DDC分類 100

Full Description

This book is about the empiricist challenge to literature, and its influence on eighteenth-century theories of fiction. British empiricism from Bacon to Hume challenged the notion that imaginative literature can be a reliable source of knowledge. This book argues that theorists of the novel, from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen, recognized the force of the empiricist challenge but refused to capitulate. It traces how, in their reflections on the novel, these writers attempted to formulate a theoretical link between the world of experience and the products of the imagination, and thus update the old defenses of poetry for empirical times. Taken together, the empiricist challenge and the responses it elicited signaled a transition in the longstanding debate about literature and knowledge, as an inaugural round in the persisting conflict between the empirical sciences and the literary humanities.

Contents

Introduction.- 1. Maps of Worlds Unseen.- 2. David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge.- 3. Empiricism and Fielding's Theory of Fiction.- 4. Varieties of Propositionalism.- 5. Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction.- Conclusion.- Works Cited.- Index.-