The Age of Projects

by Novak, Maximillian E.

• ISBN13: 9780802098733
• ISBN10: 0802098738
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-28
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

-The Projecting Age- was a term the English novelist Daniel Defoe used to describe the end of the seventeenth century. This term could just as easily be used, however, to describe the period known as the 'Long Eighteenth Century' (1660-1789). The Age of Projects uses the notion of a project as a key to understanding the massive social, cultural, political, literary, and scientific transitions that occurred in Europe during this time.The contributors to this collection examine fraudulent, grandiose, altruistic, and idealistic projects that reveal the period's radical breaks from the past and its preoccupation with the future. Examining topics as diverse as Jonathan Swift's satire on the possibility of a computer, to Gottfried Leibniz's effort to build one, and Edmund Burke's prediction that the project of democratic governance would be taken over by greedy adventurers, this volume provides significant insight into the period's ambitions for an improved future.A well-balanced collection by leading scholars from diverse disciplines, The Age of Projects is a significant contribution to intellectual history, literary history, and the history of science.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 3
Retrieving The Past
Family, Inheritance, and Clarendon's History of the Rebellion	p. 29
The Interplay of Past and Present in Dryden's 'Palamon and Arcite'	p. 51
Trojan Originalism: Dryden's Troilus and Cressida	p. 73
Canon versus Survival in 'Ancient Music' of the Eighteenth Century	p. 91
Improving The Present
A Revolution in Political Economy?	p. 115
'Wandring Ghosts of Trade Whymsies': Projects, Gender, Commerce, and Imagination in the Mind of Daniel Defoe	p. 141
Living Forever in Early Modern Europe: Sir Francis Bacon and the Project for Immortality	p. 166
Johnson before Boswell in Eighteenth-Century France: Notes towards the Impossible Project of Reclaiming a Man of Letters	p. 185
Art from Nowhere: The Academy in Utopia	p. 215
Envisioning The Future
Composing Westminster Bridge: Public Improvement and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century London	p. 243
Here Comes the Son: A Shandean Project	p. 271
Science, Projects, Computers, and the State: Swift's Lagadian and Leibniz's Prussian Academy	p. 297
Geographical Projects in the Later Eighteenth Century: Imperial Myths and Realities	p. 318
Forging Figures of Invention in Eighteenth-Century Britain	p. 344
Measure for Measure: Projectors and the Manufacture of Enlightenment, 1770-1820	p. 370
Contributors	p. 391
Index	p. 395
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