Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge

by Seth Rudy

Overview

Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate complete knowledge of the world. It draws on a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and British Enlightenment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137411549
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	10/02/2014
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	261
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Seth Rudy is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Rhodes College, USA. Though devoted primarily to British poetry and prose of the eighteenth century, he has also published and presented work in the fields of Dickens studies, data visualization, and the modern history of print and digital encyclopedias.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Concepts of Completeness 2. Complete Bodies, Whole Arts, and the Limits of Epic 3. Worlds Apart: Epic and Encyclopedia in the Augustan Age 4. Mid-Century Experiments in Encyclopedism 5. Collapse and Reconstitution: Epic and Encyclopedia Revisited Coda: The Angel and the Algorithm Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

In Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, Seth Rudy ‘tells the story of long-term aspirations to comprehend, record, and disseminate ‘complete’ knowledge of the world’ and ‘explores the persistent failure of these ambitions’ … . Rudy’s book is a useful introduction to the form. … Rudy’s survey of this dilemma makes useful contributions to the history of scholarship.” (Jack Lynch, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 28 (3), Spring, 2016)

“Rudy’s impressive and judiciously selected range of material certainly addresses the parameters of ‘literature’ and ‘encyclopedism’ outlined in the title and gives us perceptive insights into what Rudy calls the productive indeterminacy of completeness as a literary feature … . Rudy thus offers an invaluable, if not foundational contribution to research in this area and his readers will be richly rewarded by the book’s considerable originality and perceptiveness.” (Adrian J. Wallbank, The BARS Review, Issue 47, Spring, 2016)

From the Publisher