Table of 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.

Promotional Information

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

Reviews

"The approach is lively and engaging, context-rich and historically immersed, imaginative and responsive to the realities of the discourse community." Choice "Hawes' sensitive reading of enthusiastic language and his obvious pleasure in its iconoclastic mania to loosen and unsettle, to fragment and recombine, deepens our understanding of early modern literary culture." Anne L. Cotterill, Albion "...Mania and Literary Style buzzes with interest...This book should be read..." Nigel Smith, Modern Philology "Clement Hawes's outstanding new book on the history of literary enthusiasm has arrived. Mania and Literary Style is a provocative and exciting account." Studies in Romanticism