Mania and Literary Style

Klappentext This study analyzes 'enthusiastic' writing from the Ranters to Swift! and explores madness and sanity in literature. Zusammenfassung This highly original study identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart! and offers a powerful critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: mania as rhetoric; Part I. Defiant Voice: 1. 'Howl, you great ones': enthusiastic subjectivity as class rhetoric; 2. 'A huge loud voice': leveling and the gendered body politic; 3. Strange acts and prophetic pranks: apocalypse as process in Abiezer Coppe; Part II. Patrician Diagnosis: 4. Return to madness: mania as plebeian vapors in Swift; Part III. Beautiful Liminality: 5. Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno; 6. Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno; 7. Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno; 8. Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno; Epilogue: beyond pathology.

Klappentext

This study analyzes 'enthusiastic' writing from the Ranters to Swift, and explores madness and sanity in literature.

Zusammenfassung
This highly original study identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart, and offers a powerful critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

Inhalt
Introduction: mania as rhetoric; Part I. Defiant Voice: 1. 'Howl, you great ones': enthusiastic subjectivity as class rhetoric; 2. 'A huge loud voice': leveling and the gendered body politic; 3. Strange acts and prophetic pranks: apocalypse as process in Abiezer Coppe; Part II. Patrician Diagnosis: 4. Return to madness: mania as plebeian vapors in Swift; Part III. Beautiful Liminality: 5. Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno; 6. Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno; 7. Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno; 8. Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno; Epilogue: beyond pathology.