Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, Series Number 29)

This highly original study of the "manic style" in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellows enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Its account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude that 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