Earl Of Shaftesbury Research Articles

Shaftesbury Reconsidered


 
 
 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, is a complex figure in the intellectual history of eighteenth-century Britain. He can easily appear as an anachronism, contemptuous or ignorant of the advances in learning underway in the age in which he lived. In the original index to the second edition of his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1714), ‘Metaphysicks’ is followed by ‘necessary Knowledge of nothing knowable or known’. Under ‘Philosophers’ are the entries ‘See CLOWN’, and ‘Moral Philosophers of a modern sort, more ignorant and corrupt than the mere Vulgar’. One seeks an entry for ‘Newton, Isaac’ in vain; and whilst Bacon had the honour of being cited by Shaftesbury—once—it was only to establish that he had been fortunate to have ‘escap’d being call’d an ATHEIST’ by his contemporaries, an oversight Shaftesbury was eager to remedy. Rather than trouble himself with the productions of a modern age whose philosophy he considered to be ‘rotten’, Shaftesbury unabashedly proclaimed his preference for the Stoic moralists of classical antiquity. In his General Dictionary (1739), Thomas Birch noted that Shaftesbury ‘carried always with him’ the ‘moral works of Xenophon, Horace, the Commentaries and Enchridion of Epictetus as published by Arrian, and Marcus Antoninus’.
 
 

Shaftesbury—An Important Forgotten Indirect Source of Kierkegaard’s Thought

Abstract The third Earl of Shaftesbury is not only a forgotten indirect source of Kierkegaard’s thought, but an important one as well. Kierkegaard adopts many ideas of the British philosopher of the Enlightenment, paraphrases him in his journals and writings and refers to him explicitly when introducing his interest in the legitimacy of the comic in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. To the best of my knowledge, however, there is no reference to Shaftesbury in the literature on Kierkegaard; thus, the relationship between the two thinkers has not been investigated. In this article, I propose to fill this gap as well as explain how Shaftesbury could have influenced Kierkegaard’s thought. I argue that Shaftesbury anticipates some of the problems that Kierkegaard is usually credited with formulating, as well as some of the solutions Kierkegaard found to the problems they share. In particular, I maintain that Kierkegaard’s reference to Shaftesbury reveals an important debt.With his views on the relation of the comic to truth, Kierkegaard not only joins the interminable debate that followed Shaftesbury’s alleged assertion that ridicule is the test of truth but also settles it by devising his ethics of the comic

UNC Wilson MS 547 ~ “Blind Zeal or Party Enthusiasm”: A Freethought Response to Henry Sacheverell and the Stresses of 1710

This article locates the hitherto unknown manuscript poem “Blind Zeal or Party Enthusiasm” within the political context of 1710 and, in turn, examines Henry Sacheverell’s impact on Deism and Freethought in light of “Blind Zeal.” A complete text of the poem, with certain historical and critical annotations, is offered below. Finally, I offer an interpretation of the poem that may narrow our possibilities for attribution—focusing, most crucially, on the author’s construction of the poem’s speaker: an earnest and sententious individual compelled, by the violence of the religious schisms of 1709, to a fraught meditation on brotherhood. For years, John Toland and other Freethinkers had chronicled the rise of faction, and the Sacheverell Affair seemed to bring their worst nightmares to life. The poet of “Blind Zeal” draws on these very real anxieties—using a locus communis from Virgil’s Eclogues as a classical touchstone—but offers a glimmer of optimism in his valedictory invocation of Aesop, an author imitated by both the Earl of Shaftesbury and Toland.

Brett D. Wilson A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745. Brett D. Wilson. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Pp. 293.

<i>Brett D. Wilson</i> A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745<i>A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745</i>. Brett D. Wilson. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Pp. 293.

An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth

Reviewed by: An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth D. W. Hayton Robert Molesworth . An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor, ed. Justin Champion . Indianapolis : The Liberty Fund , 2011 . Pp. lvii + 394 . $18.49 . Robert, first Viscount Molesworth (1656–1725) was perhaps the most important of the Irish “commonwealthsmen” identified in Caroline Robbins’s pathbreaking study The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Harvard, 1959; reprinted by The Liberty Fund in 2004). Political historians focus on his exposition of “Gothic constitutionalism” as a classic exemplar of libertarian Whiggism, and explore his connections with the third earl of Shaftesbury, whose advocacy of a “polite” culture of civic virtue he is alleged to have brought to Ireland. After 1715, Molesworth, despairing of preferment in England, retired to his Irish estates and ensconced himself within a circle of disciples, including the young Francis Hutcheson, through whom Shaftesbury’s ideas were transmitted to Scotland. Historians of Ireland are interested in Molesworth’s contributions [End Page 186] to the development of a “patriot” interest in the Dublin parliament and the Dublin press after 1714. And historians of Denmark, where Molesworth served unhappily as William III’s envoy extraordinary between 1689 and 1692, still pick over the insults to their native land, its people, and especially its monarchy, contained in the famous (or to, Danes, infamous) Account of the kingdom published in 1694. These different phases of Molesworth’s life reflect an unsettled temperament and disappointed ambition, resulting in a public life marked by sharp changes of direction. For many years, he was torn between settling in Ireland and London; he oscillated between supporting Whig ministries as bastions against “popish” absolutism, and opposing them when he smelled a betrayal of traditional principles; and he was himself alternately attracted by the prospects of office and repelled by the expectations of patronage. Throughout, however, he kept the greater good firmly in view. Devoted to the ideal of liberty and public virtue, he despised tyranny, especially “priestcraft,” whether Roman Catholic or High Anglican. Molesworth’s attributable published writings have been gathered for the first time in this handsomely produced volume, one of a series of principal libertarian tracts in the library of Thomas Hollis, the eighteenth-century English Dissenter whose mission in life was to reprint and circulate works from the canon of English republican thought. Hollis was a particular benefactor of American colleges, including Harvard, and this connection presumably forms the rationale for the series. Molesworth’s editor is Mr. Champion, whose own studies of English anti-clericalism, and of Toland, an Irish writer with a close personal connection to Molesworth, fit him admirably for the task. This edition brings together the Account of Denmark and the full text of Molesworth’s translation of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (the preface of which is often studied separately), and adds an interesting pamphlet from the days of Molesworth’s Irish exile, the Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723), an early example of the literature on Irish “improvement” that reached maturity a decade or so later with the writings of Thomas Prior and Arthur Dobbs. Although the editorial apparatus is minimal (some might wish for more since Molesworth is not important enough to make another edition likely in the near future), Mr. Champion amply explains for the “general reader.” The discussion of the Account of Denmark, with its essential warning that liberty could be imperiled and even destroyed by Protestant as well as Catholic monarchs bent on absolute rule, and of Franco-Gallia, with its account of the ideal “Gothic constitution,” in which liberty was guaranteed by aristocratic virtue, sets Molesworth’s writing in a long chronological and a broad continental perspective. It also integrates them into a vision of liberty’s origins in historical processes. Mr. Champion’s persuasive reading emphasizes Molesworth’s “historical scholarship,” which connects closely with that of Molesworth’s protégé Toland, and finds a link between the Danish and French experience as establishing “how historically contingent these traditions of freedom were.” The afterlife of both texts is discussed...

Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683 ed. by John Spurr

Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683 ed. by John Spurr

Hobbes, Locke and the Consequences: Shaftesbury's Moral Sense and Political Agitation in Early Eighteenth-Century England

This article examines the political (and Whig) agenda behind the earl of Shaftesbury's moral and religious thought, offering a reading of the so-called ‘moral sense’ that, based on Terry Eagleton's Marxist interpretation of moral-sense philosophy in general and Shaftesbury's use of the concept in particular, illuminates how far the moral sense serves a propagandistic purpose in Shaftesbury's writings. A close examination of this aspect, which has so far not been considered in the relevant literature on Shaftesbury, illuminates the anti-Hobbist and, by implication, anti-Tory (and High Church) tendency of his moral philosophy in the context of Low Church Anglicanism.

ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, THIRD EARL OF SHAFTESBURY. Standard Edition: Complete Works, Correspondence, and Posthumous Writings, II,6: Askemata.

In 1698, Anthony Ashley Cooper, grandson of the first Earl of Shaftesbury (Dryden’s Achitophel), was 27 years old, and suffering from nervous exhaustion. Three years earlier, he had been elected in the Whig interest as MP for Poole, but soon developed a ‘Convulsive Asthma’ that his doctor attributed to long evenings spent in the committee rooms. He was dividing his time already between politics and authorship. Earlier in 1698, he had edited a volume of homilies by the Latitudinarian divine Benjamin Whichote, with a preface in which he doubted the usefulness of sermons and demanded that philosophy be freed from the control of clerics and systematicians. He had also finished An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, a shortish, methodical treatise of philosophy in which he proposed the naturalness of social affections as the basis of a vision of moral autarky in a harmonious, stoic universe. But Shaftesbury could not get his inner life to correspond with the providential schemes set out in the Inquiry. In 1698, gripped by what seems to have been a major personal crisis, he declined to stand for re-election to parliament. Instead, he left England in August for a 7-month philosophical retreat at Rotterdam, the city (then home to his tutor John Locke) from which he had begun his grand tour of Europe a decade before.

“Voice and Accents”: Enthusiastic Characterization in Shaftesbury’s The Moralists

The third Earl of Shaftesbury creates a “sociable enthusiast” in The Moralists (1708), published in his major work, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). This sociable enthusiast embodies a refined form of enthusiasm in a respectable subject—a philosopher, presented as moderator of a dialogue. I argue that, for Shaftesbury, the special problems of recognizing a socially useful enthusiasm and employing it well were closely tied to ethical concerns about the culture of the philosopher’s character. These concerns led Shaftesbury to illustrate his own ideas about the dialogic personal practice of philosophy with the characters of three modern Socratics, producing an aestheticized theory of enthusiastic self-characterization in which the philosopher can only perform “true enthusiasm” by multiplying himself into different characters.

Digital Editing and the Eighteenth-Century Text: Works, Archives, and Miscellanies

This article develops recent work by literary historians on miscellany publication, and on the printed miscellanies that were so important and popular for the early eighteenth-century book trade. It offers a history of the form, illustrated by comments made by the Duke of Buckingham, Francis Osborne, Sir William Temple, Charles de Sainte-Évremond, John Locke, John Wilson, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay. It examines examples of miscellanies produced by John Dryden and his publisher Jacob Tonson, by John Dennis and Charles Gildon, and by Pope and Swift. Previous commentators have argued that miscellanies were the product of book-trade contingency—publishers simply bundled whatever fugitive poetry they happened to have to hand. This article argues that miscellanies were in fact well-theorized vehicles for authorial and editorial intention. Multiauthor miscellanies often represented complicated patterns of social and cultural allegiance. Miscellaneity had distinct formal meaning. This essay proposes that editors and designers of electronic editions should consider “digital miscellaneity” as an eligible model for future editions of eighteenth-century texts.

Reading Shaftesbury's Pathologia: An Illustration and Defence of the Stoic Account of the Emotions

Summary The present article is an edition of the Pathologia (1706), a Latin manuscript on the passions by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). There are two parts, i) an introduction with commentary (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679795), and ii) an edition of the Latin text with an English translation (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679796) . The Pathologia treats of a series of topics concerning moral psychology, ethics and philology, presenting a reconstruction of the Stoic theory of the emotions that is closely modelled on Cicero and Diogenes Lærtius. It contains a most detailed typology of the passions and affections as well as an analysis of a series of psychological connections, for example between admiration and pride. On the basis of his reconstruction of Stoic moral psychology and ethics, Shaftesbury argues that in one of his phases, Horace should be interpreted as a Stoic rather than as an Epicurean. The translation and the commentary draw attention to the relations between the Pathologia and Shaftesbury's English writings, most importantly Miscellaneous Reflections and the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, which sheds light on several features of Shaftesbury's relation to Stoicism.

Pathologia, A Theory of the Passions

Summary The present article is an edition of the Pathologia (1706), a Latin manuscript on the passions by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). There are two parts, i) an introduction with commentary (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679795), and ii) an edition of the Latin text with an English translation (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2012.679796) . The Pathologia treats of a series of topics concerning moral psychology, ethics and philology, presenting a reconstruction of the Stoic theory of the emotions that is closely modelled on Cicero and Diogenes Lærtius. It contains a most detailed typology of the passions and affections as well as an analysis of a series of psychological connections, for example between admiration and pride. On the basis of his reconstruction of Stoic moral psychology and ethics, Shaftesbury argues that in one of his phases, Horace should be interpreted as a Stoic rather than as an Epicurean. The translation and the commentary draw attention to the relations between the Pathologia and Shaftesbury's English writings, most importantly Miscellaneous Reflections and the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, which sheds light on several features of Shaftesbury's relation to Stoicism.

Political Individuals and Providential Nature in Locke and Pope

While John Locke and Alexander Pope are often treated as political opposites, this essay contends that Locke's Two Treatises shares important conceptual ground with Pope's Essay on Man . Both writers give consenting individuals agency and the social contract transformative power, even as both also insist that the created world offers clues about how God wants societies to work. I propose that these unexpected similarities confirm recent work in ecocriticism and the history of science that suggests that eighteenth-century nature could have moral or political content. Indeed, the similarities raise far-reaching questions about the contours of the consent-giving subject in the period's contractarian thought.

Difference and Enlightenment Violence: Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

This essay is a review of Daniel Carey's Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006).

Between the Grand Tour and the sublime sea: Thomas Coke and William Kent at Holkham

Holkham is one of the best-known eighteenth-century English estates. Acknowledging Coke's and Kent's travels on the Grand Tour, previous studies have underestimated the significance of the estate's...

Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683 – Edited by John Spurr

Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683 – Edited by John Spurr

Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men by Stephen H. Gregg

225 to get published. Ms. Maruca rightly states that the statute of 1709, known as the ‘‘Copyright Act,’’ was more of a smokescreen protecting booksellers’ copyright interests than it was a law intended to establish authors’ copyrights. However, her follow-up statement—‘‘in order to get published a writer had to sell this right’’—is not entirely true. Many publications of the following decades show imprints that read ‘‘Printed for the Author by [such and such a printer].’’ In such cases, of course, the author did not sell the copyright to the printer (or bookseller), but rather assumed all expenses the publishing agent incurred for the book’s paper, printing, and advertising . Likewise, authors who had already established popular reputations and therefore considered their new publications to be sure sellers did not feel compelled to sell their copyrights to their booksellers; and often booksellers, especially beginners, were happy just to share the profits with such authors. Finally, as Ms. Maruca herself notes, Pope set up businesses for a series of booksellers (Lawton Gilliver, Dodsley) so that he would not have to negotiate with established City booksellers for the copyrights to his works. Notwithstanding Ms. Maruca’s significant achievement, at times certain themes seem questionable or disproportionate, for example, her penchant for sexualizing the printing/publishing process: she dedicates thirteen pages, in one instance, to a sexual interpretation of Moxon’s and Smith’s typesetting equipment. Although indeed Moxon employed the terms ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ in describing the interaction of the tools of his trade, his allusions were more likely voiced in the jargon of a modern plumber’s describing the joining of pipes. Ms. Maruca’s novel and intriguing interpretation takes historical liberties. Finally, traditional book historians will find her volume hard travelling. Whereas traditional book history has usually been conveyed in the simple language of the trade, the new language of media theory that characterizes Ms. Maruca’s treatment often obscures the subject she is attempting to encapsulate. We find such long stretches as: ‘‘Such an analysis does acknowledge the especially slippery nature of print as a self-advertising discourse, invisibly mediating itself through itself. To disrupt its tautology and to re-envision it as the graphic, visible tool that it is, we must turn to the rhetoric of print, to print as a human-linguistic construct.’’ It is not surprising that the author misinterprets Thomas Sprat’s intention when the seventeenth-century bishop, attempting to put an end to the inflated language that had characterized science of the past, insisted that the work of the Royal Society be carried on in the ‘‘language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants.’’ James E. Tierney University of Missouri–St. Louis BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED STEPHEN H. GREGG. Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men. Burlington , VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 208. $99.95. Defoe’s women—Moll Flanders and Roxana—have gender issues. Until recently , his men did not. Robinson Crusoe struggled for control over his passions , H. F. the Saddler wrestled with a vengeful (if not absent) God who visited 226 London in the time of the plague, Colonel Jack looked for gentility in all the wrong places, and Captain Bob dared not explain the basis of his friendship for William the Quaker, but none of these dilemmas was thought to be related to their masculinity. Mr. Gregg now shows us that a unifying theme of much of Defoe’s writing had to do with the nature of manliness, a problem made especially urgent by the emergence of a culture in which such traditionally (or stereotypically) feminine practices as the pursuit of civic and religious virtue, the consumption of luxury goods, and a dependence on credit and trade increasingly defined what it was to be a man. Defoe, like the Earl of Shaftesbury and other contemporaries, assumed that masculinity was normative and natural, and defined femininity (and feminized men, like fops) as the contradiction to manliness. Thus physical vigor, personal courage, rationality, godliness, selfcontrol , and an ethic of civic utility comprised manliness, and their contraries were feminine. But none of the males in Defoe’s writings exhibited all of these qualities all of the time; rather, his men are often anxious that they...

&lt;i&gt;Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury . Standard Edition: Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, ed. Wolfram Benda et al.Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holz-boog, 2008. £ 318. So far ten volumes of the Standard Editionof the Shaftesbury Project based at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg have appeared. When finished, it will comprise the writings published by Shaftesbury during his own lifetime (including any early versions of the treatises later joined to form Characteristicks) and of manuscript drafts for planned works (for instance Plasticks, published in volume I, 5, Aestheticsin 2001). For the first time Shaftesbury's correspondence will also be covered in its entirety. Complete and meticulously edited, the Standard Editionis unique and will stimulate Shaftesbury scholarship. The Standard Editionis designed to illustrate [End Page 80]how far the earl subjected himself in private and, as an author, in public to the "study, pains, or application," the " limae labor" ( Miscellaneous ReflectionsV, 1). The planned Chartae Socraticae, a book conceived as a companion to the virtue and philosophy of the ancients, bears this out. It would have taken the form of a critical edition offering those Greek texts which, in Shaftesbury's opinion, most faithfully preserve for us the life and thought of the historical Socrates (particularly Xenophon's Memorabiliaand Apology). The clearly programmatic Chartae Socraticae(the present edition is the first to date) were designed to present Socrates as "the divinest Man that had appear'd ever in the Heathen World," as someone for whom philosophy was quite rightly "a matter of Practice" and who was able to maintain virtue and morality in every situation. This approach, implying a fundamental concord between the Christian religion and secular philosophy on a moral plane, pervades Shaftesbury's writings and is noticeable as early as his preface to his edition (1698) of Benjamin Whichcote's Select Sermons(see vol. II, 4 of the Standard Edition). The present volume, exemplary in its careful and detailed editing, shows that Chartae Socraticae, in spite of having survived as a fragment, is at the core of Shaftesbury's thinking and affected many parts of his work. Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock University of Göttingen Copyright © 2011 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo

“Stock the Parish with Beauties”: Henry Fielding's Parochial Vision

The parish and the social systems it sustains are prominent in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. His parochial vision, formulated across the range of his literary, critical, and juridical writings, constitutes an intricate scheme of surveillance, discipline, and care that Fielding hoped to see applied throughout the nation. He combines a plan for reforming oversight of the poor (from the intimate confines of parish management through the supervisory offices of the county and the magistracy) with a heuristics of judgment and discrimination, based on the visible authenticity of poverty and verified by the ridiculousness of affectation, which he exemplifies through the antiromance of Joseph Andrews. Romance, for Fielding, is the literary version of affectation, a transgressive masquerade that belongs to social emulation and that can be unmasked by a “test of truth,” derived from the third earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.

Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling

Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling Miranda Burgess (bio) Miranda Burgess University of British Columbia, Canada Miranda Burgess Miranda Burgess is Associate Professor of English at the Unviersity of British Columbia and the author of British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830. She is finishing Romantic Transport, 1790–1830, a book that examines the technologies and anxieties of mobility at the turn of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of feeling, the poetics of the figure, and experiments in narrative form. Her next project is a history of the idea that art moves those who encounter it. Footnotes I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support of the project to which this essay belongs. 1. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 3, 10. 2. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 4. Subsequently cited in the text. 3. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) 10, 193; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 31–32, 658. 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 10. Subsequently cited in the text. 5. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978) 316. Subsequently cited in the text. 6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 13. Subsequently cited in the text. 7. For Hume 576, sympathetic feeling proceeds from visible signs to a deduction of causes to “such a lively idea of the passion as is presently converted into the passion itself.” 8. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). 9. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 191, 197, 207. Subsequently cited in the text. 10. De Man, “Metaphor (Second Discourse),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 151. Subsequently cited in the text. 11. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002) 29–30. 12. Among the many rich and promising existing schemas for distinguishing between feelings and affects, this essay follows Brian Massumi’s development, in Parables 23–45, of a Spinozist model in which affects, as “intensities” existing as rich fields of potential, become feelings when they enter the related spheres of volition, cognition, experience, and language, which is also to say subjectivity. 13. “Transport” experienced a brief vogue in the late 1980s, perhaps in consequence of the psychologist Victor Nell’s Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), in which the term is repeatedly invoked to name the imaginative participation in scenes Nell theorizes as critical to readerly enjoyment. Karen Swann’s “Public Transport: Adventuring on Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain,” in ELH 55.4 (1988): 811, argues for the “creaks and jolts, shrills and iron clangs, [and]… insults… to one’s amour propre” that result from the experience of sympathy, or “transubjectivity,” Wordsworth depicts between Sailor and Female Vagrant, but these reminders of a material substrate for vagrant affect serve chiefly as a metonym for publicity (as in a public conveyance such as the stagecoach). David Marshall, in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 5, ascribes to several writers of the long eighteenth century, including Mary Shelley, “an investment in the concept of sympathy as a transport that would transcend the distance and difference between people, allowing an exchange between parts, characters, and persons,” but does not elaborate on the material conditions of such an exchange. More recently, “The Transport of the Novel,” the title of Deidre Lynch...