Critical Enthusiasm

Capital Accumulation and the Transformation of Religious Passion
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-976426-6
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 514 g

Interdisciplinary approach will appeal not only to scholars of literature, but also scholars of religion, history, and those that work on the law and literature
Draws on a series of archival documents that have been unexplored, including works by the French Camsards
Examines statute law pertaining to urban development in the first decades of the eighteenth century in London, specifically around waste management and sewer development.

Critical Enthusiasm concerns itself with two major, interrelated phenomena of the long eighteenth century: the onset of capital accumulation and the loosening of religious discourse to describe intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical experiences. Through this unusual pairing, Critical Enthusiasm shows that debates around religious radicalism are bound to the advent of capitalism at ist very root: as legal precedent, as financial rhetoric, and as aesthetic form. As a result, we must contextualize the histories of religion and secularization in terms of the economic landscape of early modernity.

Critical Enthusiasm contributes to new directions of scholarship in literary and legal history, secularization studies, and economic criticism. It is unique among other such projects, given that it produces a model for literary study that is simultaneously attuned to the history of capital accumulation and to the forces of religious dissent. Adopting a comparative, transatlantic approach, Critical Enthusiasm situates the rhetoric of enthusiastic rapture in the context of the major institutional transformations of early modernity - transformation that now drive our contemporary world order: the dispossession and plunder of the globe, the rise of finance, legal reform, and the administration of racialized labor.

By approaching the history of capitalism through religious debates, Critical Enthusiasm discloses legacies of aesthetic form and of global flows of capital that have been hitherto inaccessible to our study of the period. Chapters bring together the moral philosophy of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, French Camisard religious prophesy, early modern statute law, Swift's poetry, and the political theory of Hobbes, Hume, and Locke.

Zielgruppe

Readers of PMLA, ELH, Eighteenth Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation Cultural Critique, Law and Literature; scholars interested in: The literary study of the law/critical legal studies;Transatlantic studies/Atlantic World Studies; Secularization Studies; Economic history/New Economic Criticism

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rosenberg, Jordana

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

INTRODUCTION:
ENTHUSIASM AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF ACCUMULATION

SECTION ONE: TIME
CHAPTER ONE: ENTHUSIASM AND HISTORICISM: MOSAIC LAW AND THE NARRATION OF HISTORY:
CHAPTER TWO: THE LEGISLATION OF ACCUMULATION: THE CAMISARD TRIAL AND STRUCTURES OF BELIEF

SECTION TWO: SPACE
CHAPTER THREE: SOCIAL REGULATION AND TRANSATLANTIC ACCUMULATION:
CHAPTER FOUR: "A CRY FROM THE DESART": SPATIALITY AND SECULARISM:
CHAPTER FIVE: POETIC ENTHUSIASM; THE CITY, THE COUNTRY, AND EXTENDED ACCUMULATION:
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jordana Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Amherst