Mania and Literary Style

This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Clement Hawes offers a counterweight to recent work which has addressed the subject of literature and madness from the viewpoint of contemporary psychological medicine, putting forward instead a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. He argues that the writings of dissident 'enthusiastic' groups are based in social antagonisms; and his account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude which persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

"The approach is lively and engaging, context-rich and historically immersed, imaginative and responsive to the realities of the discourse community." Choice, "Hawes' sensitive reading of enthusiastic language and his obvious pleasure in its iconoclastic mania to loosen and unsettle, to fragment and recombine, deepens our understanding of early modern literary culture." Anne L. Cotterill, Albion, "...Mania and Literary Style buzzes with interest...This book should be read..." Nigel Smith, Modern Philology, "Clement Hawes's outstanding new book on the history of literary enthusiasm has arrived. Mania and Literary Style is a provocative and exciting account." Studies in Romanticism