Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age

by Douglas Lane Patey

• ISBN13: 9780521128728
• ISBN10: 0521128722
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England. By examining in particular Augustan notions of probability and the way they provided a framework for thinking about and organising experience, Dr Patey reconstructs a characteristically eighteenth-century theory of literature which offers a much more satisfactory account of the work of Pope, Johnson, Fielding and others than the Romantic literary categories already in existence. The scope of this study is encyclopaedic and it will be an essential reference work for all scholars of eighteenth-century English literature and intellectual history, as well as historians of ideas.

Table of Contents

Preface

Stages in the History of the Idea of Probability

From rhetoric to science

Probability and signs: reasoning from effect to cause

Probability in Augustan Literary Criticism

Vraisemblance, probability and opinion

The literary work as a hierarchy of probable signs

The role of probability in Augustan theories of imitation

Probability and the Meaning of Augustan Narrative

Probability and literary form

The conditions of knowing in Augustan fiction

Sentimental communion and probable inference: Mackenzie and Sterne

Association, reverie and the decline of hierarchy

Concluding theoretical postscript

Appendices

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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