The Civilized Imagination
A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott

The Civilized Imagination is a study of literature in a period of cultural change.

Daniel Cottom (Author)

9780521110976, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 May 2009

240 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.31 kg

The Civilized Imagination is a study of literature in a period of cultural change. As part of the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a great transformation occurred in the relations among aesthetic theory, literature, and society. This study analyses such changes as they appear in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, three apparently distinct novelists whom the author locates within a unified cultural movement. Although the works of these writers are extremely different in many respects, in Professor Cottom's view they are all preoccupied with the changing relation between aristocratic and middle-class values. In Ann Radcliffe's works middle-class values are beginning to emerge within a governing aristocratic context; in Jane Austen's novels these newer values are precariously balanced against the old; in Sir Walter Scott's books they have become victorious, at least superficially. Professor Cottorn examines the way these writers deal with such topics as taste, landscape, communications, morality and women, in order to show how certain aesthetic problems result from social change.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Of taste and the civilised imagination
Part I. Ann Radcliffe: 2. The figure in the landscape
3. The labyrinth of decorum
Part II. Jane Austen: 4. The control of meaning
5. Attachments and supplantments
6. Reading the word of mature
Part III. Sir Walter Scott: 7. Blind roads
8. Superstition and the enchanted reader
9. Violence and law
10. Conclusion
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]