| This project asks what it means in eighteenth-century Britain to say that someone is "an enthusiast." Reading enthusiasm under the rubric of characters in novels, sermons, tracts, and poems, my dissertation combines analysis of religious and poetic enthusiasm in the period. I argue that, by depicting themselves or others as enthusiasts, writers modulate the relationship of the individual's imagination and the needs of a society; they also challenge the progress of an era that is not yet despiritualized or secularized, but which is increasingly suspicious of literalized metaphors of mind and the expectation of naive or direct reception of God's messages. Enthusiastic characters adopt an apparently inward, insular and antisocial subjectivity as a means of critiquing modern manners. Through characters I show how enthusiasm, which is archaic when it entails superstition, fanaticism, or innovation, becomes useful when it entails sensitivity to images, rejection of formality, and warmth of sentiments, especially in opposition to self-interest, religious lukewarmness, and secularization.;Enthusiastic characters both challenge and forward eighteenth-century agendas about the limits of the self and the value of a strong imagination. In my first chapter, I argue that the "sociable enthusiast" created by the third earl of Shaftesbury is a way of recognizing a socially useful enthusiasm closely tied to ethical concerns about the culture of the philosopher's character. Next, by analyzing Henry Fielding's array of enthusiastic characters in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, I demonstrate that his character-theory enables him to incorporate enthusiasts within the "book of nature." Third, I show how John Wesley's responses to negative portrayals of Methodists make use of the didactic form of "the character," modulating his version of "the Methodist" into something less than an enthusiast but more than a rationalist, a spiritually awakened subject. His rhetoric here is illuminated by comparison with characterizations in Edward Young's religious poem Night-Thoughts and Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast . My final chapter examines two novels, The Female Quixote and The Spiritual Quixote, showing how quixotes serve a didactic, recuperative function as modified, exemplary enthusiasts. |
