Author : Robert Zaretsky
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 24,44 MB
Release : 2015-03-23
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0674368231
Throughout his life James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Few periods better crystallize this turmoil than 1763–1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky’s thrilling intellectual adventure.
Author : James Robert Wood
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 37,42 MB
Release : 2019
Category : Anecdotes
ISBN : 9780813942209
"This volume is both a formal study of the anecdote's properties and possibilities and an inquiry into the anecdote's intellectual function in Enlightenment culture. The author contends that anecdotes acted in Enlightenment writing as mediators between the incidents of human life and the laws of human nature, connecting the abstractions of philosophical reflection with lived experience. Successive chapters take a specific genre (the essay), a single writer (David Hume), a historical event (the Endeavour voyage), and a literary project (the Lyrical Ballads) as nets for collecting anecdotes. Each chapter is committed to the particularities of individual anecdotes and the specificities of the uses to which these anecdotes were put. However, the book also outlines a larger historical narrative in which the anecdote moves from a central place in the science of human nature to holding a particular place in poetry, even as the anecdote began to lose its currency in the emerging human sciences"--
Author : Irma S. Lustig
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 19,87 MB
Release : 2021-11-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813187451
These eleven original essays by well-known eighteenth-century scholars, five of them editors of James Boswell's journal or letters, commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell's death on May 19, 1795. The volume illuminates both the life and the work of one of the most important literary figures of the age and contributes significantly to the scholarship on this rich period. In the introduction, Irma S. Lustig sets the tone for the volume. She reveals that the essays examining Boswell as "Citizen of the World" are deliberately paired with those that analyze his artistic skills, to emphasize that "Boswell's sophistication as a writer is inseparable from his cosmopolitanism." The essays in Part I focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment, at home and abroad, to Boswell's personal development. Marlies K. Danziger restores to significant life the continental philosophers and theologians Boswell consulted in his search for religious certainty. Peter Perreten examines Boswell's enraptured study of Italian antiquity and his responses to the European landscape. Richard B. Sher and Perreten document the personal and aesthetic influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish jurist and leading Enlightenment figure, on Boswell. Michael Fry discusses Boswell's relationship with Henry Dundas, political manager for Scotland, and Thomas Crawford examines Boswell's long-standing interest in the volatile political issues of the period, including the French Revolution, through his correspondence with William Johnson Temple. In evaluation Boswell's performance as Laird of Auchinleck, John Strawhorn documents his efforts to improve the estate by use of new agricultural methods. The essays in Part II study aspects of Boswell's artistry in Life of Johnson, the magnum opus that set a standard for biography. Carey McIntosh examines Boswell's use of rhetoric, and William P. Yarrow offers a close scrutiny of metaphor. Isobel Grundy invokes Virginia Woolf in demonstrating Boswell's acceptance of uncertainty as a biographer. John B. Radner reveals Boswell's self-assertive strategies in his visit with Johnson at Ashbourne in September 1777, and, finally, Lustig examines as a "subplot" of the biography Johnson's patient efforts to win the friendship of Margaret Montgomerie Boswell. An appendix by Hitoshi Suwabe serves scholars by providing the most exact account to date of Boswell's meetings with Johnson.
Author : Robert Zaretsky
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 23,38 MB
Release : 2019-02-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0674737903
A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb. In October 1773, after a grueling trek from Paris, the aged and ailing Denis Diderot stumbled from a carriage in wintery St. Petersburg. The century’s most subversive thinker, Diderot arrived as the guest of its most ambitious and admired ruler, Empress Catherine of Russia. What followed was unprecedented: more than forty private meetings, stretching over nearly four months, between these two extraordinary figures. Diderot had come from Paris in order to guide—or so he thought—the woman who had become the continent’s last great hope for an enlightened ruler. But as it soon became clear, Catherine had a very different understanding not just of her role but of his as well. Philosophers, she claimed, had the luxury of writing on unfeeling paper. Rulers had the task of writing on human skin, sensitive to the slightest touch. Diderot and Catherine’s series of meetings, held in her private chambers at the Hermitage, captured the imagination of their contemporaries. While heads of state like Frederick of Prussia feared the consequences of these conversations, intellectuals like Voltaire hoped they would further the goals of the Enlightenment. In Catherine & Diderot, Robert Zaretsky traces the lives of these two remarkable figures, inviting us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.
Author : Leo Damrosch
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 498 pages
File Size : 41,36 MB
Release : 2019-03-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0300244967
Prize-winning biographer Leo Damrosch tells the story of “the Club,” a group of extraordinary writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.” In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.
Author : Irma S. Lustig
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 31,70 MB
Release :
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813133461
Author : Richard B. Sher
Publisher : Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 10,69 MB
Release : 1990
Category : History
ISBN :
"In the standard accounts of the American Enlightenment, Scottish influences on American culture are often recognised but usually limited to the effects of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy from the 1790s onwards. In the standard accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment, America's influence on Scottish thought is given little attention. Scholarship on both Enlightenments generally neglects religion, music, architecture and other important areas of culture. This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the rich and varied Scottish-American cultural relations in the eighteenth century. There are three broad topics: John Witherspoon as a bridge between evangelical religion and the Enlightenment during the era of the American Revolution; the respective influences of American affairs on Scottish thinkers, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson and aristocratic 'country' Whigs, and of Scottish thought and rhetoric on the American Founding Fathers; and the Scottish component in the culture of late eighteenth-century Philadelphia, including philosophy and literature, medical education, music and architecture"--Back cover.
Author : William Clark
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 586 pages
File Size : 39,41 MB
Release : 1999-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226109404
Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "englightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academics and boisterous clubs, plans for violent wars and for universal peace, are all relocated in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors show how changing forms of discipline, machinery, and instrumentation affected the emergence of new kinds of knowledge; consider how institutions of public rate taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, both in the principal European countries and in areas peripheral to Europe, the book also includes ample illustrations and an extensive bibliography. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment. -- from back cover.
Author : Ronald S. Love
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 35,12 MB
Release : 2008-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 031334244X
One of the few self-named historical movements, the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe was a powerful intellectual reaction to the dominance of absolutist monarchies and religious authorities. Building upon the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers—philosophes—set out to improve humanity through reason, knowledge, and experience of the natural world rather than religious doctrine or moral absolutes. Their emphasis on truth through observable phenomena set the standard of thought for the modern age, deeply influencing the areas of government, the modern state, science, technology, religious tolerance and social structure. The Enlightenment's legacy is particularly visible in the United States, where its ideals inspired a revolution and served as the building blocks for the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. Narrative chapters, photos, biographical sketches, primary document excerpts, and an extensive bibliography expand the readers' understanding of the event, providing a current perspective on this key turning point in Western ideology. Comprehensive narrative chapters explore the historical background of the movement, as well as its relationship to nature and natural philosophy, religious belief and church institutions, society and the state, and the French Revolution. Photos, biographical sketches of key figures, excerpts from important primary documents of the time, and an extensive bibliography expand the reader's understanding of the movement that ushered in the modern era.
Author : James Boswell
Publisher :
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 46,52 MB
Release : 1768
Category : Corsica (France : Region)
ISBN :
