The Age of Reasons

Download or read book The Age of Reasons written by Wendy Motooka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wendy Motooka contends that 'the Age of Reason' was actually an Age of Reasons. Joining imaginative literature, moral philosophy, and the emerging discourse of the new science, she seeks to historicise the meaning of eighteenth-century 'reason' and its supposed opposites, quixotism and sentimentalism. Reading novels by the Fieldings, Lennox and Sterne alongside the works of Adam Smith, Motooka argues that the legacy of sentimentalism is the social sciences. This book raises our understanding of eighteenth-century British culture and its relation to the 'rational' culture of economics that is growing ever more prevasive today.