Historicizing the Enlightenment (2 Vol Set)

"The essays collected in these remarkable volumes offer a stirring defense of the revolutionary nature of early enlightenment thought. McKeon reminds us—forcefully—just how much insight and reach can be achieved by an intellectual history as fearless and dialectical as his." ~Wolfram Schmidgen, author of Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730

"Historicizing the Enlightenment adds to intellectual history’s customary mix of political, social, economic, and religious contexts a detailed analysis of literary works, period aesthetics, and cultural commentary. These two volumes will be essential reading for scholars across a number of fields." ~April London, author of The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

"Michael McKeon’s signal achievement as an intellectual historian and literary scholar is to capture the force of concepts in the making. His account of the Enlightenment is unparalleled in its depth and breadth." ~Frances Ferguson, author of Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism did to Action

"Unparalleled in its range and erudition, McKeon’s far-reaching and boldly synthetic intellectual history challenges critical accounts that abstract the conceptual and methodological innovations of Enlightenment from the moment of their emergence. Essential reading for anyone interested in ongoing debates over the role of the Enlightenment in global modernity." ~Lynn Festa, author of Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture

"Michael McKeon has written a deeply learned history of the English Enlightenment which draws on both literary sources and philosophical and political texts. He finds a series of repeated patterns of thought as he takes us through considerations of tradition, civil and religious liberty, secularization, the economy, and modern systems of gender and sexuality. It is an exhilarating and challenging book." ~Randolph Trumbach, coeditor of A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages

"With one party to the culture wars monumentalizing the dubious sides of imperialism and their opposition editing history to shame them, it is a welcome sign to see Michael McKeon returning to the history of the Enlightenment in order to use periodization 'as a tool to think with.'" ~Jonathan Lamb, author of Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery