Common Sense in Early 18th-Century British Literature and Culture: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics, 1680–1750

Description

While the popular talk of English common sense in the eighteenth century might seem a by-product of familiar Enlightenment discourses of rationalism and empiricism, this book argues that terms such as ‘common sense’ or ‘good sense’ are not simply synonyms of applied reason. On the contrary, the discourse of common sense is shaped by a defensive impulse against the totalizing intellectual regimes of the Enlightenment and the cultural climate of change they promote, in order to contain the unbounded discursive proliferation of modern learning. Hence, common sense discourse has a vital regulatory function in cultural negotiations of political and intellectual change in eighteenth-century Britain against the backdrop of patriotic national self-concepts. This study discusses early eighteenth-century common sense in four broad complexes, as to its discursive functions that are ethical (which at that time implies aesthetic as well), transgressive (as a corrective), political (in patriotic constructs of the nation), and repressive (of otherness). The selection of texts in this study strikes a balance between dominant literary culture – Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson – and the periphery, such as pamphlets and magazine essays, satiric poems and patriotic songs. Contents List of Illustrations 1 The Discourse of Common Sense 1.1 The Argument: Common Sense as Compensation 1.2 A Short History of Common Sense in Philosophy and Criticism 1.3 The Discursive Formation of Early Eighteenth-Century Common Sense 2 The Ethics of Common Sense 2.1 Good Sense and Good Taste: The Common-Sense Union of Ethics and Aesthetics – Shaftesbury and Pope 2.2 Perversions of Moral Sense – The Fable of the Bees 2.3 Life Ethic and Happiness – Samuel Johnson and Rasselas 3 The Transgressions of Common Sense 3.1 “These Arrows that fly in the Dark”: Approaching Augustan Satire and Common Sense 3.2 “Good Sense Defaced”: Enthusiasm and False Learning – A Tale of a Tub and Peri Bathous 3.3 Human Nature, Reason, and Madness – A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, Gulliver’s Travels, and An Essay on Man 4 The Politics of Common Sense 4.1 The Birth of Common Sense Discourse from the Spirit of Patriotism 4.2 English Common Sense Personified – Pasquin and the Many Lives of Common Sense 4.3 Nationalist Common Sense: Liberty and Revolution 5 The Other of Common Sense 5.1 The Foreign Other – Robinson Crusoe and The Citizen of the World 5.2 The Female Other – The Rape of the Lock 6 The Afterlife of Common Sense Bibliography 1 Abbreviated Source References 2 Historical Sources 3 Critical Sources Author and Title Index Subject Index