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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment

Norton, Brian Michael

Paperback

Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral European History

ISBN10: 1611485894
ISBN13: 9781611485899
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: Jun 10 2014
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.88 Depth: 8.99
Language: English
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 wellbeing 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.

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