Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel

Roger Maioli is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. He holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and an MA in English Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo. In addition to articles in SEL, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Shandean, he authored the first Brazilian translation of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.

“Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel explores the impact of the empirical turn in philosophy on how imaginative writing could be justified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. … Maioli’s conclusion demonstrates how eighteenth-century novel theory prefigures modern arguments about the value of the humanities. … It is a thought-provoking end to a thoroughly engaging book.” (Gillian Skinner, The BARS Review, Issue 52, 2018)“Maioli’s book takes us back to eighteenth-century debates about the capacity for literature to teach us anything meaningful about the empirical world. … the value of Maioli’s book is that it ensures that we continue to think about why literature is valuable in a world in which it seems that value can never be taken for granted.” (Peter DeGabriele, Modern Philology, Vol. 116 (02), June, 2018)

• Introduction.- 1. Maps of Worlds Unseen.- 2. David Hume and the Empiricist Challenge.- 3. Empiricism and Fielding’s Theory of Fiction.- 4. Varieties of Propositionalism.- 5. Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction.- Conclusion.- Works Cited.- Index.-