European University Institute Library

Mania and literary style, the rhetoric of enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart, Clement Hawes

eng

index present

non fiction

Mania and literary style

electronic resource

dictionaries

558430163

Clement Hawes

Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English literature and thought, 29Cambridge Social Sciences eBooksACLS Humanities E-Book

the rhetoric of enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart

This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Clement Hawes offers a counterweight to recent work which has addressed the subject of literature and madness from the viewpoint of contemporary psychological medicine, putting forward instead a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. He argues that the writings of dissident 'enthusiastic' groups are based in social antagonisms; and his account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude which persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.--, Provided by publisher

Mania & Literary Style