Article ID: CBB113779356

Sir Charles Grandison, Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman (2013)

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This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novel's fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the state's role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural law's circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorf's model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novel's eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.

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Article Alexander Cook; Ned Curthoys (2013) Introduction. Intellectual History Review (pp. 285-288). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB113779356/

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Authors & Contributors
Ismael, J. T.
Salmon, Aïcha
Lynn Festa
Carter, Noni D.
Godel, Rainer
Curthoys, Ned
Concepts
Definition of human; human nature
Science and literature
Natural laws
Natural law theory
Philosophy
Anthropology
Time Periods
18th century
Enlightenment
17th century
19th century
16th century
Early modern
Places
Europe
Scotland
Germany
England
United States
Spain
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