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Imperial Paradoxes
At war for sixty years, eighteenth-century Britain and France experienced demographic, social, and economic exchanges despite their imperial rivalry. Paradoxically, this rivalry spurred their participation in scientific and industrial developments. Their shared interest in standards of living and cultural practices was fuelled by migration and philosophical exchanges that reciprocally transmitted the values of urban geography, medicine, teaching, and the industrial and fine arts.
In Imperial Paradoxes Robert Merrett compares British and French literature on those topics. He explains how food, wine, fashion, and tourism were channels of interdisciplinary relations and shows why authors in both nations turned the notion of empire from commercial and military expansion into a metaphor for exploring self-knowledge and pleasure. Although cognitive science has come to the fore only in the past two generations, eighteenth-century writers tested problems in the dualist and faculty psychology of Western rationalism. Themes of embodiment and embodied thought drawn from recent theorists are applied throughout this book, along with dialectics and models of the senses operating together.
Imperial Paradoxes avoids the limitations of strict chronology, weaving together multiple narratives for a more complete picture. Applying major works in the fields of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and pedagogical theory to prose, poetry, and drama from the eighteenth century, Merrett shows how attention to eating, drinking, dressing, and travelling gives important insights into individual literary works and literary history.
eBook
Daniel Defoe, Contrarian
A highly conscious wordsmith, Daniel Defoe used expository styles in his fiction and non-fiction that reflected his ability to perceive material and intellectual phenomena from opposing, but not contradictory perspectives. Moreover, the boundaries of genre within his wide-ranging oeuvre can prove highly fluid. In this study, Robert James Merrett approaches Defoe’s body of work using interdisciplinary methods that recognize dialectic in his verbal creativity and cognitive awareness.
Examining more than ninety of Defoe’s works, Merrett contends that this author’s literariness exploits a conscious dialogue that fosters the reciprocity of traditional and progressive authorial procedures. Along the way, he discusses Defoe’s lexical and semantic sensibility, his rhetorical and aesthetic theories, his contrarian theology, and more. Merrett proposes that Defoe’s contrarian outlook celebrates a view of consciousness that acknowledges the brain’s bipartite structure, and in so doing illustrates how cognitive science may be applied to further explorations of narrative art.
eBook
Liberal Arts Education
Current theories of liberal arts education entail opposing notions of selfhood and institutional relevance. To Robert E.
Reference
Marriage and Matrimony
Since the last two chapters have explicated Defoeʹs institutional conservatism with regard to regal authority and have unfolded in his fictions the self-destructive obsessions with monarchical imagery, it should be less surprising that the above marital prescriptions fromConjugal Lewdnessinvolve political concepts that are traditional and progressive.² One reason for exploring this dialectic in the present chapter is to see how Defoe conceives of the plural institutional functions of marriage and to show how his polarity thinking about love and domesticity requires narrative structure in his fiction and non-fiction to traverse the boundary between description and prescription constantly. While
Book Chapter
Serious Reflections
The coda to this chapter explores Defoeʹs polar discussion of the literary methods and reputations of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Milton, showing that his contrary stances to these authors imitate prophetic modes of discourse. If, as the epigraphs above suggest, Defoe adopts prophetic stances in a range of texts, he does so precisely inSerious Reflections,which acknowledges cultural resistance to forensic oratory and appreciates that speaking and hearing do not necessarily accord with each other. He often spoke like a prophet because he observed that his contemporaries chose to be deaf to the semantic extensions of ʺjust
Book Chapter
Contraries
This statement by Robinson Crusoe with its first-person plural pronoun and absolute negative offers a generalization that stems from personal retrospection of fallibility yet presumes to speak for all readers. This insight into the limits of perception and cognition is voiced passively: truth about the human condition is reached only through acknowledgment of its imperfectibility, the contrariety of circumstances, and the polarities of experience. Crusoeʹs pithy and epigrammatic contention is a key to the genius of Daniel Defoe, to what the French would call his imaginary. In his direct and oblique commentaries on human life, Defoe favours the ebb and
Book Chapter
Biblical Allusions as Narrative Resources
The explication ofSerious Reflectionsin the previous chapter has shown that Defoe employs several voices and polar stances in order to validate storytelling and to root narrativeʹs purposive functions in the Bible and Christian doctrines. Oral and published fictions mediate for him dialectical tensions between religious and secular values, between spiritual and material circumstances. Speaking as prophet, preacher, and explicator, he challenges standard interpretations of texts and understandings of the imaginative processes involved in reading, seeing the scriptures and church doctrines as dynamic and problematic rather than dogmatically stable. In arguing with himself and adopting polar stances on spiritual
Book Chapter