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The idea of progress stood at the very center of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Britain, closely linked to every major facet of the British Enlightenment as well as to the economic revolutions of the period. Drawing on hundreds of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets, David Spadafora here provides the most extensive discussion ever written of this prevailing sense of historical optimism.
The querelle des anciens et des modernes - the question whether writers should imitate the classics or use literary forms which seemed more suited to their own era - had been debated in Europe since the earliest days of the Renaissance. This book analyses the development of the querelle following the adoption of the argument of the modernist faction of seventeenth-century France.
The qualities and achievements of eighteenth century English literature have suffered denigration as a result of a prevailing Whig interpretation of literary history. It is the contention of this book, originally published in 1986, that an alternative form of Whig interpretation is possible and even desirable. It has as its sphere of interest the ways in which views on the nature and benefits of political freedom, and various "whiggish" readings of literary history, political theory and aesthetics, did in fact shape literary and social changes through the eighteenth century. Many characteristic Romantic tenets can be seen as springing, not fully formed from the heads of their creators, but directly out of the aesthetic concerns focusing around Longinus, and the recognition of the historically singular nature of the British constitution. This book studies and analyses the forms such concerns took in several of the central thinkers and writers of the period, and is an important contribution to the understanding of the eighteenth century milieu.