University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 168
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-61148-430-4 • Hardback • October 2012 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-61148-589-9 • Paperback • June 2014 • $58.99 • (£45.00)
978-1-61148-431-1 • eBook • September 2012 • $56.00 • (£43.00)
Brian Michael Norton is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at California State University, Fullerton.
Contents
Introduction: After the Summum Bonum: Eighteenth-Century
Enquiries after Happiness
1. The Moral in Phutatorius’s Breeches: Stoicism, Subjectivism
and the Possibilities of Happiness in Tristram Shandy
2. “Vous croyez que le même bonheur est fait pour tous”:
Ethics and Singularity in Le Neveu de Rameau
3. Tragic Eudaimonism: Social Contradictions and the
Problem of Happiness in Rousseau’s Julie
4. The Politics of Happiness: Caleb Williams, Political Justice
and the Nature of Human Goods
5. Rethinking Autonomy: Emma Courtney, Feminist Ethics
and the Question of Independence
Conclusion: The Art of Life in the Age of Enlightenment
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Norton's book is an excellent read and an important study of new constructions of happiness in the 18th century. During the Enlightenment, Norton shows, happiness became desynonymized with virtue; in philosophy and literature, happiness and associated questions of 'the good life'–even the very conception of the summum bonum–diverged sharply from both Aristotelian ethics and the Christian anticipation of happiness hereafter. Norton explores the ways in which relativist and subjectivist delimiting of individual happiness as a state of personal contentment rather than as an ethical pursuit shape the rhetoric of fiction in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Rousseau's Julie, Godwin's Caleb Williams, and, particularly welcome, Mary Hays's Emma Courtney. The book is well informed by Enlightenment philosophy, in particular some unfamiliar 18th-century treatises on happiness . . . [T]he close readings Norton provides are incisive, accessible, and rewarding, and each chapter is brilliantly conceived and executed. An important contribution to the growing body of work on literature and ethics, this volume suggests approaches for other works not considered here. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews
[This book] is an important and thoughtful contribution. . . .Norton’s readings . . . are sure-footed, philosophically attentive, and ultimately compelling. . . .Without fanfare, through deft and attentive readings, Norton helps us appreciate how essential fiction is for enabling the transition between otherwise incompatible notions of happiness. . . .[The book provides] a valuable corrective to the largely epistemological and sociological approaches that have dominated the study of the eighteenth-century novel. . . .Norton’s book makes a valuable contribution . . . as much for teaching us to read the novel this way, as for providing us substantive insights into how the novel treats the highest ethical end: happiness.
— Eighteenth-Century Life
In this succinct, substantive study, Brian Michael Norton offers an engaging, accessible, and revealing reckoning of philosophical and novelistic discourse on happiness in the eighteenth century. . . .Norton’s approach to Denis Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau is especially provocative in its discussion of the implications of this shift in focus and practice. . . .His [Norton's] study is sophisticated and persuasive.
— 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era
So accepted, and dissected, is the belief in the related rise of the novel and the emergence of the modern individual that the modest shift Brian Michael Norton undertakes in his new study comes as a breath of fresh air . . . [This book] is an admirably focused monograph that opens up new expanses of critical terrain by simply shifting our gaze from epistemology to ethics. . . .This is a sharp and nuanced discussion. . . . Beautifully written and consistently insightful, Norton’s monograph makes contributions to intellectual, cultural and literary history; especially valuable is its meticulous demonstration of the influence of Stoic thought on eighteenth-century conceptions of happiness. Most promisingly, this book reorients novel studies in the direction of ethics, making a new case for the novel’s role in the making of the modern world.
— Novel: A Forum On Fiction
In a concisely woven and densely packed argument, Norton offers careful readings of texts as well as a range of references that speak to deep learning in both the philosophical and the literary traditions he engages. As a result, his book presents an intellectually compelling and utterly convincing treatment of the theme of happiness in the philosophical fiction of the eighteenth century.
— The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
There can be no doubt that Norton’s work is timely. . . .Norton’s choice of texts attests to his willingness to examine a range of material both formally and thematically. From Sterne and Diderot, to Rousseau, Godwin, and Hayes, he follows the patterns of challenge that the fictions--in comic and satiric form, in dialogue and narrative—insist on.
— Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness is an excellent comparatist study of changing ideas of happiness in both philosophy and the novel, as sure-footed with the French as with the English texts it examines. Norton reveals a productive tension in the eighteenth century between happiness understood as the categorical “good life”—the virtuous life that is right for all rational agents—and happiness conceived as “being pleased with one’s life” in subjective and infinitely various ways. Impeccably researched and crisply written, this book will be of enduring importance.
— Adam Potkay, William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities, The College of William and Mary