Peter Walmsley

The Philosopher as writer : the eighteenth century

Explores the literary dimension in the practice of philosophy by eighteenth-century authors, including Rousseau, Kant, Leibniz, Herder, Hume, Pope, Shaftesbury, and Wollstonecraft. A wide range of literary structures and stylistic questions are considered.

Whigs in Heaven: Elizabeth Rowe's Friendship in Death

This essay provides an analysis of Elizabeth Singer Rowes Friendship in Death (1728), proposing that her fictional letters from the dead offer a new, distinctively Whig vision of heaven. Dominant Anglican theology, following Saint Augustine, held that heaven, in its spiritual perfection, is unimaginable for those on earth. Rowe, an Independent whose circle included Isaac Watts, argues just the opposite. Drawing on Milton, Addison, and Watts, Rowe makes a case for a heaven that is a meaningful sequel to this life, describing a place that is fully available to human sense and imagination and where the souls of the dead continue to work toward personal perfection and enjoy the pleasures of a celestial society.

“Live to Die, Die to Live”: An Introduction

two sets of images illuminate this special issue of EighteenthCentury Fiction, “Death/La Mort.” Marble putti grace the front and back covers: one, a girl, gazes calmly at a skull; the other, a boy, weeps as he holds an hourglass. Probably carved between 1680 and 1720 by a Dutch or English craftsman, these putti were intended to decorate a funeral monument in a church or a family burial chapel, and perhaps did at some point. Though the carvings are gorgeously realized, they are nonetheless conventional: putti holding the emblems of death commonly adorned more lavish baroque tombs.1 Products of a pan-European aristocratic aesthetic, they were designed to convey the wealth and power of a great family. The second set of images, appearing between the articles of this issue, could hardly differ more. These verses and woodcuts from the English folk rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” are indigenous art, cheaply reproduced for children and the marginally literate. The ballad, which has obscure origins, first appeared in print in Tom Thumb’s Pretty Songbook of 1744 and became over time a common chapbook nursery rhyme. These images create a world of fable: a parish of animals tending its dead and enacting the mundane mechanics of Christian burial—the tolling of bells, the sewing of shrouds, the bearing of palls. Although some readers have sought a political allegory in these lines, the intent of the poem is, clearly, to teach children the steps by which the dead, even the very poor, are laid to rest and grieved. As much as the

The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy

Acknowledgments Note to the reader Introduction Part I. The Principles of Human Knowledge: 1. Ideas and the ends of language 2. Locke, roles, and passion 3. The ends of morality and religion 4. Metaphor and the evidence of things not seen Part II. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous: 5. The opportunities of dialogue 6. The character of the elenchus 7. Comic characters 8. Comic form Part III. Alciphron: 9. Argument into satire 10. Conversations with ingenious men Part IV. Siris: 11. The rude essay 12. The method of inductive analogy 13. The hoary maxims of the ancients Conclusion Select bibliography Index.

Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (review)

This study is constructed on a foundation of secondary rather than primary research. Indeed, the words of the main eighteenth-century authors are at times situated in such a dense matrix of recent theory and commentary that historical distance seems to disappear. The language of Hayden White or J.G.A. Pocock is made to seem almost interchangeable with that of Samuel Johnson or Edmund Burke. In a book about history and the creation of consensus, this style is oddly self-reflective: Damrosch seems determined to create the impression of a broad agreement that embraces not only modern historians, but intellectuals from across the centuries. The result is a study that is up-to-date and knowledgeable, but that disappoints its original promise to venture outside the mainstream of opinions and attitudes. Nicholas Hudson

Writing under the dominion of chance: A review article

Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Edited by Chris Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. 338 pp.

The rhetoric of Berkeley's philosophy

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