Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)
Book Details
Author(s)Brian Michael Norton
PublisherBucknell University Press
ISBN / ASIN1611484308
ISBN-139781611484304
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank1,683,784
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel’s participation in eighteenth-century “inquiries after happiness,†an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of well-being in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton’s innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His centralargument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual’s psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one’s power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment’s ethical legacy.
