Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment

The Genius of Every Place

Kevin L. Cope

• Publisher: Lehigh University Press
• Year: 2024
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611466034
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

Seeking to honor and extend the critical legacy of Howard Weinbrot, this volume re-examines, rebuilds, and upgrades the most prominent pillars of long eighteenth-century scholarship. The collection is divided into four thematic sections, beginning with a series of chapters offering fresh analyses of Swift, Dryden, Hogarth, and other major authors and artists of the period. In the sections that follow, the contributors not only explore biographies of both highly esteemed figures and notorious deviants, but also investigate the very concept of Enlightenment as it has evolved from the eighteenth century to today. The final section features chapters that probe the complex interaction of identity, persona, and place, traversing the countless locales in which the British—and the international—eighteenth century emerged. The volume ultimately covers a range of experience that extends from the gallows to the landscape garden and from heroic antiquity to Romantic-era France. Juxtaposing the local and particular against the grand and universal, Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment testifies to the complexity and ongoing significance of eighteenth-century culture.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part One: Poised on a Plinth or Perched on a Precipice?: Major Authors
• Part Two: Lives: Actual, Engrossed, or Otherwise
• Part Three: Turbulent Times and Edgy Eternity: Conceiving, Building, and Revising the Enlightenment
• Part Four: Identity, British or Personal: Finding Oneself in the Long Eighteenth Century