ISBN: 0315050675 9780315050679

Category: Unavailable

Page count: 500

The following chapters examine the case studies. Dryden's mimesis of various responses to God's justice and mercy is sustained by Renaissance psychology and by the historical mimesis of Paradise Lost. The King and the narrator at first confuse liberty with libertinism, but in response to the history represented in the poem, the King speaks at the end with truly Godlike mercy based on justice. Richard Savage is a melancholic whose fantasies disjoined from memory exacerbate the extremes of his experience. Like Democritus Junior, Johnson the narrator enacts and draws his readers into the process of harmonizing imagination and memory in response to Savage's history. In Tom Jones various characters, including the narrator, express a range of ideas about Fortune and Providence which are evaluated in the context of the mimesis. The readers, like Tom, learn an imaginative prudence by observing God's providence working through particular yet typical individuals and events in a community in time.