Seditious Allegories
Автор: Michael Scrivener
Год издания: 0000
The multifaceted career of John Thelwall (1764-1834)—poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, politician, scientist—is the lens through which we are offered here a new look at the phenomenon of British Jacobinism, long distorted by the critical view of it as intellectually weak bequeathed to us by Coleridge and Wordsworth, once Jacobins themselves. This book, the first on Thelwall in almost one hundred years, combines literary analysis and historical description to show how this innovative political activist remained true to his radicalism while adapting his methods in the face of the anti-Jacobin reaction that Paine's The Rights of Man helped set off. The three parts of the book set Thelwall's achievements and challenges in the political and literary context of his times. Part One, "Jacobin(s) Writing," focuses on the most essential aspects, ideologically and formally, of the insurgent writing of the 1790s to which Thelwall contributed. Part Two, "The Voice of the People," treats both Thelwall's radical oratory and journalism, as well as his writings and activities as a natural scientist and rhetorician, a professor and technician of "elocution." Part Three, "Jacobin Allegory," expounds on Thelwall's characteristic strategy of indirect expression through synecdoche and allegory, which he used in his later career after repression forced him out of politics. Through Thelwall's life Michael Scrivener succeeds in revealing how British Jacobinism reshaped the public sphere, initiating numerous literary experiments with oratory, pamphlets, periodicals, popularizations, and songs in the spaces opened up by political associations, lectures, meetings, and trials. Jacobinism thus altered the very institutions of reading and writing by expanding literacy, restructuring the popular arena for reading, and generating a body of diverse texts that were "seditious allegories."
Monde primitif, considere dans son genie allegorique et dans les allegories auxquelles conduisit ce genie
Автор: Court de Gebelin
Год издания:
Полный вариант заголовка: «Monde primitif, analyse et compare avec le monde moderne, considere dans son genie allegorique et dans les allegories auxquelles conduisit ce genie : precede du plan general des diverses parties qui composeront ce monde primitif : avec des figures en taille-douce / par M. Court de Gebelin».
Goethe's Allegories of Identity
Автор: Jane K. Brown
Год издания:
A century before psychoanalytic discourse codified a scientific language to describe the landscape of the mind, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored the paradoxes of an interior self separate from a conscious self. Though long acknowledged by the developers of depth psychology and by its historians, Goethe's literary rendering of interiority has not been the subject of detailed analysis in itself. Goethe's Allegories of Identity examines how Goethe created the essential bridge between the psychological insights of his contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the psychoanalytic theories of his admirer Sigmund Freud. Equally fascinated and repelled by Rousseau's vision of an unconscious self, Goethe struggled with the moral question of subjectivity: what is the relation of conscience to consciousness? To explore this inner conflict through language, Goethe developed a unique mode of allegorical representation that modernized the long tradition of dramatic personification in European drama. Jane K. Brown's deft, focused readings of Goethe's major dramas and novels, from The Sorrows of Young Werther to Elective Affinities , reveal each text's engagement with the concept of a subconscious or unconscious psyche whose workings are largely inaccessible to the rational mind. As Brown demonstrates, Goethe's representational strategies fashioned a language of subjectivity that deeply influenced the conceptions of important twentieth-century thinkers such as Freud, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt.
A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People
Автор: Christopher Hill
Год издания:
Preacher, Soldier, Rebel: Who was the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the most influential books ever written? John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the most significant works of English literature. Translated into more than 200 languages, there was a time when almost every household in Britain was more likely to have a copy than the Bible. This classic biography of Bunyan by one of the leading historians of the 17th century offers a reassessment of the man in the context of his times. He is usually studied and remembered as the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress and other Christian literature, but his own consideration of himself would most probably have been as a preacher first and foremost—a man whose nonconformist religion led him into conflict with the Quakers and into years of imprisonment. It was in the service of this religion that his writings were produced, many of them during the nearly twelve years spent in Bedford jail between 1660 and 1672. An extraordinary insight into John Bunyan, one of the towering figures of English literature, this remains the definitive biography.