Peter Knox-Shaw

While numerous sources have been found for the ideas expressed by Cleanthes and Demea in the Dialogues, Philo's thoughts have commonly been taken to originate with Hume. It is clear, however, both from internal and external evidence, that Hume drew for his (sometimes wayward) spokesman on that mid-century ferment in the life sciences that Denis Diderot described as a "revolution." The restoration of this context—obscured by the late publication of the Dialogues —suggests that Philo's celebrated critique of theism is merely one face of a discourse that centres in new ideas about generation and evolution. On this reading the Dialogues emerges as a conjectural as well as analytic work, one that offers in addition to its demolition of the argument from design an argument about design, built on the premise that natural order can be independent of a creator. The philosophical definition that Hume brings to ideas that first surfaced in the works of Maupertuis and Buffon makes the Dialogues the most potent pre-Darwinian work of its period.

Jane Austen was received by her contemporaries as a new voice, but her late twentieth-century reputation as a nostalgic reactionary still lingers on. In this radical revision of her engagement with the culture and politics of her age, Peter Knox-Shaw argues that Austen was a writer steeped in the Enlightenment, and that her allegiance to a sceptical tradition within it, shaped by figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume, lasted throughout her career. Knox-Shaw draws on archival and other neglected sources to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of the Steventon Rectory where Austen wrote her juvenilia, and follows the course of her work through the 1790s and onwards, showing how minutely responsive it was to the many shifting movements of those turbulent years. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment is an important contribution to the study both of Jane Austen and of intellectual history at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville gave millenarians a taste of their own medicine by showing – in the conclusion to The Grumbling Hive – that a land free of the offences decried by the pious would indeed prove to be ruinous. In so doing he inaugurated a tradition of secularised apocalypse that finds one of its most famous expressions in the Dunciad. Both Pope and Mandeville make use of the millenarian motifs of Elkanah Settle’s pageants for Lord Mayor’s day, and though the Williamite politics of The Fable of the Bees was deeply inimical to the Tory wits (as appears in the satires of the Scriblerians), time has exposed a paradoxical congruence between Pope and Mandeville that underlies their official enmity.

Peter Knox-Shaw, “The Dry Salvages: T. S. Eliot in Wordsworthian Waters” Since Wordsworth was seen by T. S. Eliot both as a fellow revolutionary and as a cultural adversary, he supplies a particularly rich illustration of Eliot’s contention that the significance of a poem depends on an appreciation of its relation to the great poetry of the past. The Dry Salvages is the poem through which Eliot engages most fully with Romanticism, and it represents, as has long been recognized, his closest approach to the loco-descriptive poem of that movement. Comparison of the many specific motifs that the poem shares with The Prelude allows for a close textured account of the immediate poetic implications of the two writers’ diverging views on the role of the poet, on primitivism, on the rival metaphysics of immanence and transcendence, and on the relative importance of individual and collective identity. The two poems abound in passages sufficiently affined to reveal the differing aims and achievements of each.

Emma has often convincingly been assigned to the “quixotic” novel, a genre much favored by the long eighteenth century and admired on occasion by Jane Austen herself. But whereas novels of this type invariably end with a joint renunciation of imagination and romance in deference to a greater realism, Emma shows imagination to be integral to an apprehension of the real world, and to require, for its fidelity, a principle long enshrined by romance. Austen’s understanding of imagination as both necessary and all-pervasive—held in common with a number of contemporary philosophers who built on David Hume’s analysis of the “productive” and “magical” faculty that underlay all perception—in no way lessened her sense of its ambivalence, and Emma shows how its work of construction is constantly undermined by received stereotypes as well as by insidious subterfuges of the self. The novel celebrates an empirical habit of mind, fortified by the virtue of benevolence. Keywords: imagination, romance, realism, empiricism, Hume, Austen, Emma, benevolence

Erasmus Darwin gave the first comprehensive account of biological mimicry, a phenomenon which he boldly attributed to the instinct for self-preservation in both the plant and animal kingdoms, and ascribed histologically to an involuntary mode of imitation. Coleridge's interest in his idea of physical adaptation can be traced back to 'The Eolian Harp' but becomes central in *Christabel* where it provides, through the vehicle of Bracy's dream, a unifying metaphor for Geraldine's successful strategy of passing herself off for what she is imagined to be. But it serves also to naturalize the concept of deceit, thus critically implicating the status of ethics. The essay places the poem in the context of the deontological critique of utilitarianism that Coleridge offered piecemeal over the years, but intended, at the time, for a book to be published simultaneously with the poem. *Christabel* owes its greatness, nonetheless, to the depth and finesse of its psychological observation.