Paradox and Society
Paradox and Society

Author: Louis Schneider

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-31

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1000947149

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The writings of Bernard Mandeville mark an important transition between enlightenment, social philosophy, and modern science. Born in Holland in 1670 and educated as a physician, Mandeville spent the greater part of his working life in England, where he died in 1733. In some respects, Mandeville can be compared to Voltaire - Mandeville's junior by twenty-four years.Mandeville had the knack of making controversies volcanic and of arousing heated debate about any topic on which he chose to comment - and he chose to comment on virtually everything. He was especially1 interested in social evolution, morality and society, prostitution and romantic love, crime and its deterrence, and in social aspects of religion. His views on these and countless other topics cohere in his continual fascination with the consequences of social and economic actions that run counter to anticipations and intentions and in the paradoxical or ironic cast that such outcomes often have. In Paradox and Society, Louis Schneider is the first to offer a full consideration of Mandeville as a sociologist.Schneider offers an intellectual and characterological portrait of Mandeville, examining his writings and reactions to him over time. Schneider goes on to review Mandeville's theory of human nature, and explores his hotly contested notion of the paradox of private vices and public benefits - that the arousal of desires is a necessary precondition for the stimulation of social and economic development.Social action outside the marketplace, and Mandeville's problematic theory of social evolution, are next considered. The volume ends with an examination of paradox, irony, and satire in society. In this detailed analysis of one of the world's most controversial social critics, Schneider shows us that Mandeville offers a vision of human society that is of enduring significance. He challenges the reader to consider how that vision might operate in today's world.

Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding

Author: Thomas R. Cleary

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0889208581

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An accurate and comprehensive study of the political aspects of Fielding’s art has been sorely needed. As a result of decades of work by literary scholars and a series of great historians, such a study is finally possible. This volume addresses that need, and, in the light of a recent revival of interest in Fielding’s work, it arrives most opportunely. The author offers here a wide-ranging focus and a firm grip on the shifting complexities of Fielding’s political situations—the loyalties and enmities, factional alignments and fractious rhetoric—that allow a satisfactory understanding of Fielding’s political writing. Political writing in Fielding’s day, as in ours, was topical, concerned with evanescent problems and day-to-day needs that were familiar to contemporaries, but that are now recaptured only with greatest difficulty. This study constitutes a thorough reconstruction of Fielding’s political context and extricates from the context Fielding’s own political endeavours. Cleary’s work will make many of Felding’s previously unstudied work accessible to students and scholars of eighteenth-century English literature. A necessary point of reference to both literary specialists and historians concerned with eighteenth-century England.

The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 2, 1660-1800
The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 2, 1660-1800

Author: George Watson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1971-07-02

Total Pages: 1698

ISBN-13: 9780521079341

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More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

British Novelists, 1660-1800
British Novelists, 1660-1800

Author: Martin C. Battestin

Publisher: Detroit, Mich. : Gale Research Company

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13:

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Essays on British novelists who were pioneers in establishing the thematic concerns, and creating the form of the classic British novel. Works reflect themes and attitudes of the modern era - unjust social and political constraints; maudlin sentimentality; fascination with thing exotic and horrifying; deepening skepticism about the validity of social, political, and religious institutions on which the old order depends.