Description
Book SynopsisElations rewrites the history of early-18th-century English literature around the politics and poetics of "Enthusiasm." It examines the aesthetic theory of the period, traces the evolution and differentiation of a
poetic enthusiasm from religious enthusiasm, and reassesses the poetry of two poets very popular in their time: James Thomson and Edward Young.
Trade Review"Like Derrida and Paul de Man, what Irlam does is not "scholarship," but textual reading yoked to a priori metaphysical argument. . . . Irlam's readings [of Young's
Conjectures on Original Composition], and in his chapters on Thomson, make
Elations a book worth inspecting." --
Modern Philology"Irlam brings an imaginative historical perpective to bear on his subjects, contextualizing their achievement through detailed examination of contemporaneous critical and philosophic discourse. . . . The reading of Thomson supported by the preliminary history of enthusiasm is thorough, imaginative, and innovative." --
Studies in Romanticism"Irlam's readings are deft and judicious, and this study makes a large and . . . brilliant contribution to the field." --
Journal of English and Germanic PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I. Power Speaking: 1. Enthusiasm in the seventeenth century: the vicissitudes of an image 2. 'For the benefit of civil society': impressing the subject 3. In the dungeons of the sublime: Joseph Addison and 'the pleasures of the imagination' Part II. Accesses Of Ecstasy And The Rhetoric Of Self-Alteration: 4. Vatic tremors: unworlding and otherworldliness in James Thomson's 'The Season' 5. Altered states: epiphany and the logic of sacrifice in 'The Seasons' 6. Immortality, or the art of remaining forever young: Edward Young's 'Night-Thoughts' 7. Absence begins at home: crafting the moral subject Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index.
