Melvyn New

Given the progress made in recent years in recovering the writings of early modern women, one might expect that a complete set of the important works of Mary Astell (1666-1731) would have been reissued long before now. Instead, only portions of the thought of the 'First English Feminist' have reached a wide academic audience. This volume presents a critical and annotated edition of the correspondence between Astell and John Norris of Bemerton (1657-1711), Letters Concerning the Love of God, which was published in three separate editions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1695, 1705, 1730). This work had profound significance in eighteenth-century intellectual and religious circles, and represents a crucial step in the development of Norris and Astell's philosophical and theological opposition to that most prominent of Enlightenment figures, John Locke. Letters Concerning the Love of God includes, as contextual material, Norris's Cursory Reflections upon a Book Call'd, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the first published philosophical response to (as Bishop Stillingfleet would later put it) Locke's 'new way of ideas,' and Astell's biting and comprehensive attack on Locke in the 'Appendix' to the second edition of The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1717). These texts serve to place both Letters and its authors in the contentious philosophical-theological climate to which they belonged, one wherein, most significantly, Locke's present-day preeminence had yet to be realized. The editors' extensive introduction and annotations to this volume not only provide background on the historical and biographical elements, but also elucidate philosophical and theological concepts that are perhaps unfamiliar to modern readers.

Letters Concerning the Love of God

Mary Astell and John Norris

Robert Bernasconi

Richard A. Cohen

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy Robert Bernasconi

In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth Century

In Proximity

Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson condemned it. James Boswell and Goethe proclaimed it a masterpiece. And from the beginning Sterne realized he had written a book that would not suit everyone's taste. For more than two centuries. Tristram Shandy (1759-67) has astounded - and by turns confounded, captivated, angered, and amused but ever entertained - readers worldwide. While on the surface a comic, disjointed account of the title character's life and times, the work is in fact a brilliant commentary on life's inherent chaos, the pointed challenge of British clergy-man-turned-author Laurence Sterne to the twin concepts of rationalism and sentimentalism. Delineating his views through skillfully drawn representations - among them Tristram, Yorick, and Uncle Toby - Sterne pinpointed issues central to not only his era but our own. Filled with thought-provoking ideas and marked by an open, conversational writing style, Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits is an adroit guide to understanding the aims and achievements of Sterne's masterpiece and to fully appreciating its lessons for contemporary times.

A Book for Free Spirits

Tristram Shandy

Peter de Voogd

Judith Hawley

These thirteen essays represent a very wide range of approaches to the fictions of Laurence Sterne, who has certainly evolved into the eighteenth century's most important influence on modern and postmodern literature. While each essay centers on his written texts or his lived contexts, they together offer homage to his endurance as an author emulated by many modern writers—Nietzsche, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Mann, Marías, Goytisolo, Fuentes, Rushdie, and Pamuk; indeed, what important writer in the past 150 years has not been influenced by Sterne?

Melvyn New

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