Michael McKeon

The Origins of Aesthetic Value

The initial concern of Marxs “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy” (1857) is to ask: Where do we begin our effort to understand a complex human activity like political economy? His response to this problem of beginnings consists in the development of a dialectical method which analyzes it into the component questions: What is the relation between material and mental activity, between (for example) economy and the idea of economy? What is the relation of abstract to concrete mental categories? What is the relation between past activity — material or mental — and the present moment of understanding? In two distinct ways, the movement of this meditation on dialectics encourages us to consider seriously die analogy between “political economy” and what we might call “literary” or “cultural economy.”

Sabbatai Sevi in England

Several years ago Gershom Scholems authoritative work on the seventeenth century messianic figure Sabbatai Sevi, first published in Hebrew in 1957, appeared in a revised English translation. The importance of Scholems work for an informed understanding of the Sabbatian movement and for the general study of religious and political movements must be acknowledged by all readers. The relevance of Sabbatais career in the Levant to the specific historical context of post-Restoration England may be less evident. If the English involvement with Sabbatai is compared with the excitement generated in other European countries by his appearance, the English connection cannot fail to appear questionable. The Jewish community in London was a relatively small one at the time of Sabbatais ascendancy, and the mass of contemporary material on which Scholem has drawn to document this extraordinary episode in Jewish history includes little that was produced for or by “English Jews.” Moreover, Scholem takes pains to discredit the common notion that English Christian speculations on the year 1666 played a direct, causal role in determining Sabbatais public emergence in the summer of the preceding year, without denying the historical interest of this conjunction of Christian expectations and Jewish developments. In the following discussion, I hope to establish the major significance of Sabbatai Sevi for England by examining several questions—limited in comparison with those entertained by Sabbatais most profound and exhaustive historian—concerning the English awareness of him 300 years ago. How and in what form did the unparalleled developments in the Levant from 1665 to 1667 first become known to English-speaking people? What contribution was made by the Sabbatian movement to Christian eschatology and to the expectations aroused among its devotees by the approach of the “wonderful year” 1666? What was the range of response to the movement among English observers; what was its ideological or sectarian meaning to contemporaries? In confronting these questions I will, of course, rely heavily on Scholems analysis and documentation of Sabbatais career.

Paradise Lost, Poem of the Restoration Period

John Miltons Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) is often classified as a Renaissance epic, along with the great narrative poems of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. However, this generic designation tells us much less about the formal nature of the poem than we learn when we contextualize it among the long English narratives with which it was contemporary: Butlers Hudibras (1663, 1664, 1678), Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress (1678, 1684), Drydens Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and Behns Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and His Sister (1984, 1985, 1987). What Paradise Lost shares with these other texts is a parodic approach to literary form, one that combines the imitation of an authoritative form with an adaptive detachment from it. This approach shows the influence of several experimental, mixed forms that flourished during the Restoration period—some of traditional standing, some emergent, and some momentary and occasional.

Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of the works received by SEL for consideration follow.