Description
Book SynopsisExplores the ways in which the non-elite literary culture of the late seventeenth to mid eighteenth centuries worked to produce knowledge through collaborative means, in opposition to this period's more widely recognized focus on the authority of individuality.
Trade ReviewCollective Understanding ends with a call to arms of sorts. Writing against formalists who would double down on the exceptionalism of literature and literary studies, Mowry asks for literary studies to "turn outward toward collaborative projects" in a way that would highlight the "collective nature of knowledge". In this sense, this book aims not just at historical recovery, but a reform of critical practice based on the kind of collective hermeneutics it describes and practices. A collectivist literary criticism that produced more work like Mowry's would certainly be worthwhile. * Peter Degabriele, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 56, Number 3, Spring 2023 *
This ambitious and interesting argument takes a genuinely fresh approach to a long-standard view of the period. Mowry is to be commended for taking on a topic, which few have touched, with such keen scepticism and assured capabilities in multiple disciplines: political philosophy, cultural history, and literary criticism. * Leah Orr *
Table of Contents1: Collectivity: Past and Present 2: Root and Branch--Representation, Collectivity, and Dissidence 3: "Past Remembrance or History" 4: Tyrants and Heroes: Reimagining Civil War History as an Instrument of Sovereignty 5: Counterpoint--Defoe's Roxana, Eliza Haywood and the Emergence of An Apolitical Hermeneutics of Collectivity Coda: Out of Time
