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The lecture will discuss what we might call "the literary self-enlightenment of the Enlightenment": How do literary texts of the period (both canonical and less well-known ones) engage with key Enlightenment ideas? Was the Enlightenment, as is often claimed, inherently racist, supportive of colonialism, excessively rational, potentially or inherently totalitarian or indifferent to the exploitation of nature? With a focus on the Enlightenment in the British Isles, but with a consistently comparative perspective including France, Germany and, to a limited extent, North America, we will see that many of the charges against the Enlightenment in recent decades were, directly or obliquely, raised in controversies within the Enlightenment, and often early on in the century. Moreover, we will see that much of this "self-enlightenment of the Enlightenment" took place in literary rather than in strictly philosophical texts, though we will also come to see that the distinction is less clear than might initially seem. The lecture will engage with texts by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Gottfried August Bürger and others. |
