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

This highly original and penetrating study explores fundamental intellectual predispositions and concepts which underpin the literature and thought of the Augustan period in England.

Douglas Lane Patey (Author)

9780521128728, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 February 2010

396 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.2 cm, 0.5 kg

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.

Preface
Part I. Stages in the History of the Idea of Probability: 1. From rhetoric to science
2. Probability and signs: reasoning from effect to cause
Part II. Probability in Augustan Literary Criticism: 3. Vraisemblance, probability and opinion
4. The literary work as a hierarchy of probable signs
5. The role of probability in Augustan theories of imitation
Part III. Probability and the Meaning of Augustan Narrative: 6. Probability and literary form
7. The conditions of knowing in Augustan fiction
8. Sentimental communion and probable inference: Mackenzie and Sterne
9. Association, reverie and the decline of hierarchy
Concluding theoretical postscript
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]