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Reinventing Romance, or the Surprising Effects of Sympathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Victoria Kahn
Victoria Kahn*
Affiliation:
University Of California At Berkeley
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Abstract

This study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert's Princess Cloria (1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinished Theophania (1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 625 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2002

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