Search results for ""Author Frank Palmeri""

Displacing the novel from the central position it has held in studies concerned with the origin or rise of the English novel, Satire, History, Novel considers novelistic forms as part of a network of complementary and competing genres, including conjectural histories and narrative satires, and regards relations among these forms as most significant and revealing. This is the first book to explore the emergence and the fading of narrative genres in the context of successive cultural paradigms and the uneven develpment of public spheres. Analyzing works written over a century and a half in three national cultures, including canonical literature by Swift, Fielding, Burney, Voltaire, Diderot, and Goethe; less familiar but important and influential narratives by Delarivire Manley, Prvost, and Wieland; almanacs and popular novels by Courtilz de Sandras and Defoe; as well as philosophical and conjectural histories by Hume, Rousseau, Gibbon, and Kant, Satire, History, Novel will contribute to intellectual history, public spheres studies, theories of narrative, scholarship on eighteenth-century literature and culture, as well as the relations of literature and philosophy to their historical contexts.

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Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers, he argues, employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. Palmeri finds evidence of speculative frameworks in the political economy of Malthus, Martineau, Mill, and Marx. He traces the influence of speculative thought in the development of anthropology and ethnography in the 1860s, the foundational sociology of Comte and Spencer, and the sociology of religion pioneered by Weber, Durkheim, and Freud. Conjectural histories reveal a surprising ambivalence toward progress, modernity, and secularization among leading thinkers of the time, an attitude that affected texts as varied as Darwin's Descent of Man, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, and the novels of Walter Scott, George Eliot, and H.G. Wells. Establishing the critical value of conjectural thinking in the study of modern forms of knowledge, Palmeri concludes his investigation with its return in the work of Foucault and in recent histories on early religion, political organization, and material life.

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