Enlightenment and Political Fiction

This book maintains that it was not passive reception but active participation of readers—including those who listened to fiction read out loud—that fostered the Enlightenment. The decision to engage in intellectual debates, grounded in ideas often first found in fiction, allowed everyday people to participate in the questioning, and eventually the decision-making, of their own states.

The easy accessibility of political fiction in the long eighteenth century made it possible for any reader or listener to enter into the intellectual debates of the time, as much of the core of modern political and economic theory was to be found first in the fiction, not the theory, of this age. Amusingly, many of these abstract ideas were presented for the first time in stories featuring less-than-gifted central characters. The five particular works of fiction examined here, which this book takes as embodying the core of the Enlightenment, focus more on the individual than on social group. Nevertheless, in these same works of fiction, this individual has responsibilities as well as rightsand these responsibilities and rights apply to every individual, across the board, regardless of social class, financial status, race, age, or gender. Unlike studies of the Enlightenment which focus only on theory and nonfiction, this study of fiction makes evident that there was a vibrant concern for the constructive as well as destructive aspects of emotion during the Enlightenment, rather than an exclusive concern for rationality.

Get Enlightenment and Political Fiction by at the best price and quality guaranteed only at Werezi Africa's largest book ecommerce store. The book was published by Taylor & Francis Ltd and it has pages.