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• Title: Towards a Socio-Historical Understanding of the Clerical-Utopian Novel *. (Essays).
• Author : Utopian Studies
• Release Date : January 01, 2003
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 237 KB

Description

THIS STUDY INVESTIGATES a group of late nineteenth-century utopian novels by clerical authors, i.e., writers who were either clergymen or the sons of clergymen; it relies for its methodology on a modification of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge as a means to illuminate the novel's treatments of both themes and characters. Mannheim stressed that the outlooks of intellectuals, writers, and artists as embodied in their philosophical conceptions, political ideas, or aesthetic creations, could be understood sociologically, i.e., in terms of the social circumstances and changes in social circumstances of their creators. Under the lens of Mannheim's ideas a fundamental conservatism in these novels becomes clear, but it is a conservatism that does not shrink from challenging the prevailing laissez faire capitalist ideas of late nineteenth-century America. Establishing Mannheim as the framework for the critical investigation of literature requires some elaboration and justification. (1) His current reputation rests on two works, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940) and Ideology and Utopia (1936), both concerned with the reconstructionist tendency in sociology after the First World War. Both are essentially collections of essays independent of one another rather than systematic treatises. In addition, Mannheim is notoriously difficult to read, and none of his works forms a coherent, much less a critical whole. These qualifications notwithstanding, there is one essay of particular importance for the analysis of literature, his piece "German Conservatism," (Mannheim, 1953, 74-164). There Mannheim stresses the link between social and cognitive phenomena, arguing that the social views of conservative German thinkers in the post-French Revolutionary era sprang from notions of a society based on pre-Revolutionary institutions and patterns. Conservatives envisioned society as comprised of estates, i.e., of status groups, and their ideas and values rested on an essentially pre-modern foundation. He notes that while conservative arguments often had a distinctly reformist and liberal ring, e.g., they opposed mechanical conceptions of the individual and the state, and they advocated many liberalizing reforms and the protection of the lower orders, at the base, their ideas were essentially feudal as regards the proper form and structure of society, and they believed that the social order was ineluctably hierarchical.

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