Reinventing Romance, or the Surprising Effects of Sympathy
2002; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1262320
ISSN1935-0236
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoThis study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert's Princess Cloria (1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinished Theophania (1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.
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