Overview
- Argues that empiricism was much less receptive to the novel than previously acknowledged
- Looks at a wide variety of well-known writers, including Henry Fielding,
- Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen
- Claims that empiricism retained its hold on the novel for much longer than scholars have thus far acknowledged
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (PERCP)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel explores the impact of the empirical turn in philosophy on how imaginative writing could be justified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. … Maioli’s conclusion demonstrates how eighteenth-century novel theory prefigures modern arguments about the value of the humanities. … It is a thought-provoking end to a thoroughly engaging book.” (Gillian Skinner, The BARS Review, Issue 52, 2018)
“Maioli’s book takes us back to eighteenth-century debates about the capacity for literature to teach us anything meaningful about the empirical world. … the value of Maioli’s book is that it ensures that we continue to think about why literature is valuable in a world in which it seems that value can never be taken for granted.” (Peter DeGabriele, Modern Philology, Vol. 116 (02), June, 2018)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel
Book Subtitle: Fielding to Austen
Authors: Roger Maioli
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (If applicable) and the Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-39858-7Published: 24 March 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-81981-5Published: 17 July 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-39859-4Published: 18 March 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6516
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6524
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 202
Topics: Eighteenth-Century Literature, Fiction, Philosophy, general