While many literary scholars consider feminism, deconstruction, and multiculturalism new avenues to truth, other readers find that such prior ideological commitments distort literature. In Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age, Daniel E. Ritchie offers a "biblical poetics" as an alternative approach to ideological criticism, exploring how the Bible's own negotiations with language affect our view of literature, specifically with respect to older texts, gender issues, ethnic diversity, and the apparent arbitrariness of language itself. Focusing here on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, Ritchie examines how a biblical poetics provides a basis for literary study in the texts of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, John Milton, Edmund Burke, and Alexander Pope, and he contrasts it to recent ideological approaches to these texts. Ritchie's biblical treatment of particular literary issues provides the basis for original historical research or literary interpretation often sharply at odds with current critical theories.

Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke

Literature & Fiction

Ritchie, Daniel E.

History & Criticism

Eerdmans Pub.Co.

The eighteenth century remains contemporary more than 200 years later because the fundamental questions raised then about politics in both the American and French Revolutions still speak to us. The writings of Edmund Burke on these and other political events of his time are today acknowledged as the basis of modern conservative thought. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of interpretative essays on Burke, and serves as a basic introduction to this seminal thinker. A member of the British Parliament from 1766 to 1794, Edmund Burke had sympathized with the American War of Independence and argued for reform of British policy toward Ireland and India, but he surprised many of his friends by his early, vehement opposition to the French Revolution. This volume brings together assessments of these and other statements by Burke by contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, along with essays by Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, who established his significance for twentieth-century conservatism. This is a collection of the best, previously published interpretive essays on Burke. It will be of interest to all those interested in the philosophical roots of conservatism, in the history of political thought, in revolution, and in modern political ideologies.

Edmund Burke : Appraisals and Applications (Library of Conservative Thought) (The Library of Conservative Thought)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Routledge

Edmund Burke: Appraisals and Applications (The Library of Conservative Thought)

The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer

Postmodern thinkers have demonstrated the fragmentation of the Enlightenment understanding of the self, society, and nature; for many, however, the postmodern alternatives--the pursuit of individual self-definition, utter skepticism regarding the relation between language and reality, or the embrace of ideological power--are unconvincing. In The Fullness of Knowing, by placing the most promising postmodern insights in dialogue with eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, Daniel Ritchie argues that we can begin to overcome post-Enlightenment fragmentation without abandoning either coherence (as many postmoderns have done) or the valid insights of modern and postmodern thought (as many traditionalists have done).

Baylor University Press

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