Imperial Paradoxes Merrett, Robert James
2021, 2021-08-15, Letnik:
83
eBook
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.
Daniel Defoe Merrett, Robert James
Daniel Defoe,
c2013, 20130328, 2013, 2013-01-01, 2013-03-22
eBook
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.
Merrett delineates the role of George Knightley, the gentleman farmer character in Jane Austen's novel, Emma, and discusses her notion of cultural idealism as explored in her novel. A figure of ...patriotism and chivalry, Knightley effects change within historical continuity, adapting tradition to evolving economic forces. He guides his community by critiquing static views of social hierarchy. Austen probes these views when she introduces the dispute between Emma and Knightley about Robert Martin's eligibility as husband for Harriet Smith. Austen leaves this dispute to be resolved by her unfolding narrative since she grasped the controversies in agrarian writing about the gentleman farmer. Alert to links between sentimental and revolutionary ideologies, she recognized challenges faced by men who aimed to renew their leadership and social dominance with increased responsibility.
Serious Reflections Merrett, Robert James
Daniel Defoe, Contrarian,
03/2013
Book Chapter
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
Defoeʹs Imaginary Merrett, Robert James
Daniel Defoe, Contrarian,
03/2013
Book Chapter
The dialectic of traditional and progressive ideas unfolded in the previous chapter shows that Defoeʹs differentiation between marriage and matrimony entails sets of polarities. So that his ...commentary on public and legal forms of marriage and on private and spiritual responsibilities of wedded partners will more effectively challenge lax social practices, he exhibits the reflexive functions of narrative discourse in his non-fiction and fiction: figures in his conduct manuals not only tell stories to resist or justify their participation in social practices but also are subject to the remediable power of stories; and narrators in his fictions leave the completion
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
Defoeʹs prophetic and typological allusions to the Bible detailed in the previous chapter prepare us to analyse how and why he relates political ideology to positive and negative aspects of religion ...and theology. As the text offering ultimate authority to the dialectic of transcendence and immanence in private and public discourse, the Bible functions for Defoe as the substrate of society because it provides categorical imperatives not only to the vocations involved in commerce and trade but also to politicians and theorists of government. As a believer in Godʹs absolute authority, he promoted monarchy over republicanism, often ironically embodying his
