Em, fiction

Realized reading Delariver Manley's The New Atalantis that I prefer my early English fiction before the Enlightment or during the Enlightenment but scornful about it. I don't really like the Enlightenment or the pseudo-classical alligorical shite that it produced or the feeling that the divine exists due to humanity's sufferance of it. Cause humans are perfectible in themselves, y'see. I like real classical authors better, they don't insist on dragging nymphs into everything. And I'm sick of Jove as code for "the Christian God. Ha, just joking- we're not pagans! We like the socially-sanctioned Jesus. And the Church, and especially her powerful temporal representatives!" So maybe I need to seek out authors who are flippant about this inherent value of human subjectivity thing or who don't think about it at all. Seriously, Manley, if you want to write thinly veiled portraits of all of your peers who seduced virgins or gambled or committed incest or were lesbians, don't try to pretend that you are providing moral guidance of any sort, and I don't care about how many Virtues narrate the thing. You, madame, are scandalmongering, and I refuse to play along with your "Just make sure you don't do THIS:...." game. I need to read some Chaucer. Its lack of societially based moral judgements will make me feel better.