Ends of Enlightenment (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780804742122)

Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.

Author: John Bender
ISBN-10: 080474212X
ISBN-13: 9780804742122
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/08/2012
Pages: 310
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d