Literature and encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain : the pursuit of complete knowledge

Resource Information

The work Literature and encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain : the pursuit of complete knowledge represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Literature and encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain : the pursuit of complete knowledge

Title remainder

the pursuit of complete knowledge

Statement of responsibility

by Seth Rudy, Assistant Professor, Rhodes College, USA

Title variation

• Encyclopedism in enlightenment Britain
• Pursuit of complete knowledge

Title variation remainder

the pursuit of complete knowledge

Creator

• Rudy, Seth, 1978-

Author

• Rudy, Seth, 1978-

Subject

• English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
• Enlightenment -- Great Britain
• Epic literature, English -- History and criticism
• Great Britain
• Knowledge, Theory of, in literature
• Learning and scholarship -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century
• Encyclopedias and dictionaries -- Great Britain -- History and criticism
• Encyclopedists -- Great Britain

Language

eng

Summary

At a moment when Google seeks "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", this book tells the story of long-term aspirations, first in ancient epic and then in a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and British Enlightenment, to comprehend, record, and disseminate complete knowledge of the world. It is also a story of the persistent failure of these aspirations, their collapse in the late eighteenth century, and the subsequent redefinition of completeness in modern literary and disciplinary terms. The book argues that the pursuit of complete knowledge advanced the separation of epic from encyclopedia, literature from "Literature", and the sciences from the humanities; it demonstrates that the distinctions between "high" and "low", ephemeral and eternal, useful and useless that persist today all stem from the concepts of completeness that emerged during and as a result of the Enlightenment

Member of

• Online access with purchase: Springer
• Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and cultures of print

Cataloging source

UKPGM

Dewey number

820.9/005

Index

index present

LC call number

PR448.K56

LC item number

R83 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Series statement

Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and the cultures of print