Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I LITERARY PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION: CHANGING AUDIENCES AND EMERGING MEDIA
- PART II LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
- PART III LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
- 14 History and literature 1660–1780
- 15 A preliminary discourse on philosophy and literature
- 16 Britain and European literature and thought
- 17 Religion and literature
- 18 Literary criticism and the rise of national literary history
- 19 Augustan England and British America
- PART IV LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
- PART V LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- References
15 - A preliminary discourse on philosophy and literature
from PART III - LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I LITERARY PRODUCTION AND DISSEMINATION: CHANGING AUDIENCES AND EMERGING MEDIA
- PART II LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION
- PART III LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
- 14 History and literature 1660–1780
- 15 A preliminary discourse on philosophy and literature
- 16 Britain and European literature and thought
- 17 Religion and literature
- 18 Literary criticism and the rise of national literary history
- 19 Augustan England and British America
- PART IV LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
- PART V LITERARY GENRES: TRANSFORMATION AND NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIVENESS
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- Chronology
- Bibliographies
- Index
- References
Summary
Students of eighteenth-century philosophy and literature are the inheritors of the disciplinary divisions. This chapter proposes some of the early modern terms within which the boundary between philosophy and literature was constituted, debated and crossed. It begins by moving from the general problem of division to an account of the two dominant ways in which philosophy as a field was divided between roughly 1660 and 1800. These two systems of knowledge exist side-by-side and in competition: they help explain why the same span of time would be characterised by the period designations of neoclassicism and Enlightenment. Although the method of proceeding takes into account familiar problems in the history of ideas and canonical writers in the history of philosophy and literature, the chapter provides a context within which to view the interventions of female philosophers. Women writers understood the implications of the decline of the three philosophies into two, and the collapse of the speculative into the practical.
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- The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 391 - 422Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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