This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and 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. Clement Hawes offers a counterweight to recent work which has addressed the subject of literature and madness from the viewpoint of contemporary psychological medicine, putting forward instead a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. He argues that the writings of dissident 'enthusiastic' groups are based in social antagonisms; and his account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude which persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.
• Original and provocative challenge to common ideas of madness and sanity in literature • Casts new light on work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart • Demonstrates literary value and ongoing influence of seventeenth-century radicals
Contents
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.
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