Passionate Educations
John Locke, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen
Abstract
This article connects John Locke’s concept of uneasiness to Aphra Behn’s poem “On Desire: A Pindarick” and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Behn and Austen offer a corrected reading of Locke’s overtly rationalist ideas. This comparison suggests the importance of passionate engagement as related to knowledge. This article uses a contemporary understanding of the long eighteenth-century passions to argue for how passionate experience and knowing might have occurred through the literary examples of Aphra Behn and Jane Austen.
Presentato: 07 Novembre 2018 | Accettato: 01 Dicembre 2018 | Pubblicato 17 Dicembre 2018 | Lingua: en
Keywords Affect • Knowing • Uneasiness • Experience • Desire • Feeling • Emotion • Passions
Copyright © 2018 Aleksondra Hultquist. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted in unadapted form only and provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2018/05/010