By Misty G. Anderson
In the eighteenth century, British Methodism used to be an item of either derision and wish. Many well known eighteenth-century works ridiculed Methodists, but frequently the exact same performs, novels, and prints that solid Methodists as primitive, irrational, or deluded additionally betrayed a thinly cloaked fascination with the studies of divine presence attributed to the hot evangelical move. Misty G. Anderson argues that writers, actors, and artists used Methodism as an idea to interrogate the bounds of the self and the fluid relationships among faith and literature, among cause and exuberance, and among theater and trust.
Imagining Methodism situates works through Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Samuel Foote, William Hogarth, Horace Walpole, Tobias Smollett, and others along the contributions of John Wesley, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield which will know the way Methodism's model of "experimental faith" used to be either born of the trendy international and perceived as a risk to it.
Anderson's research of reactions to Methodism exposes a sophisticated interlocking photograph of the non secular and the secular, phrases much less obvious than they appear in present serious utilization. Her argument isn't really concerning the lives of eighteenth-century Methodists; really, it's approximately Methodism because it was once imagined within the paintings of eighteenth-century British writers and artists, the place it served as an indication of sexual, cognitive, and social risk. via situating satiric pictures of Methodists of their renowned contexts, she recaptures a lively cultural debate over the domain names of faith and literature within the glossy British mind's eye.
Rich in cultural and literary research, Anderson's argument can be of curiosity to scholars and students of the eighteenth century, spiritual experiences, theater, and the background of gender.
Read Online or Download Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self PDF
Similar british & irish books
Levity of Design: Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne
How can poetry include morality via concentrating on metaphrasts? what's the relation among an allummette and the alpha rhythm? Why is it that money has changed into a metonym of goodness and luck? And primarily, is it nonetheless attainable to consider the human topic as a possible type in overdue modernity?
The Well-Tun'd Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597-1651
The years 1957–1651 marked a interval of excessive fulfillment within the heritage of music. within the Well-Tun'd observe Elise Bickford Jorgens experiences altering musical conventions of English music on the subject of new styles in poetic style from the overdue Elizabethan period during the Jacobean and Caroline years, basing her paintings at the premise that any musical atmosphere of a poem is an interpretation of the poem itself.
Jane Austen's names : riddles, persons, places
In Jane Austen’s works, a reputation is rarely only a identify. actually, the names Austen supplies her characters and locations are as wealthy in refined that means as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for instance, the house county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine isn't really as silly as she turns out: in response to legend, crafty Wiltshire citizens stuck hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a name for lack of understanding through claiming they have been digging up a big cheese”the moon’s mirrored image at the water’s floor.
Defoe and the Whig Novel: A Reading of the Major Fiction
His examine locations Defoe's significant fiction squarely within the rising Whig tradition of the early eighteenth century. It deals a substitute for the view that Defoe is basically a author of legal or event fiction and to the Marxist judgment that he extols individualism or derives his maximum suggestion from renowned print tradition.
Additional info for Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self
Sample text
35 One feature of this account that has been prominent in novel criticism is the use of the “imaginary Puritan” as the template for modern secular subjectivity. By making the Puritan “imaginary,” this critical perspective tends automatically to secularize devotional claims of characters like Robinson Crusoe, who becomes always-already homo economicus, or to read the devotional lyric of the seventeenth century as only expressions of sexual desire. This reading strategy makes expressions of religious belief as such into a misrecognition of other social or material impulses, which are the real historical content to be explored in literary reading and writing.
In this event, an individual consciousness believes the senses when it accepts the data and reflects on it to produce ideas. Here is the paradox of the Lockean proposal, which the farcical and satiric images of Methodists inadvertently underscore: a secular account of knowledge presents sensation and reflection as rational, even mechanical, but it is nonetheless predicated on an act of faith in sensation itself. Berkeley seized on this moment and its potential for skepticism, but he exacerbated the philosophical problem by trying to contain all experience within the mind of God.
Wesley took on acquisitive desire, the culture of endless work, the creation of cravings for products, luxuries, and the general “desire of novelty” that is the engine of a consumer culture. For him, these were sins woven into the structure of the emerging capitalist society that he challenged in “On Riches,” quoting Prior’s “Alma” and Pope’s “Epistle to Bathurst” (scoffing at the rich man for “the embroidery plaistered on his tail”) along the way to illustrate his point (Abingdon Works 3: 524).