Infinite Variety Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730

"This book is a striking achievement, confident in its abstractions and their utility in illuminating a shared intellectual and aesthetic preoccupation." (Modern Philology) "Infinite Variety makes for an interesting conversation with science studies where the influence of Francis Bacon and Newton create the assumption of a more ordered world (with its epistemologies richly described in Michel Foucault's still useful The Order of Things. The book opens up ways of seeing, thinking, inventing, and writing that the history of science and epistemology has not addressed. In reading this book, one realizes that the paradigm of inherent meaning in the natural world comes with contested shadow views and contrasts. The conversation, then, between works such as Powell's and Schmidgen's shows that ontology and epistemology remain robust fields for scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture." (SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900) "Part of the recent movement in eighteenth-century studies to resist the teleological secularization narrative that has governed much of the literary and cultural criticism in the field, Infinite Variety is also one of the most stimulating, original, and erudite books I've read in some time. Wolfram Schmidgen makes a cogent, compelling, and historically grounded case for the imaginative power of literature at a moment of epistemological crisis." (Helen Deutsch, University of California Los Angeles) "In Infinite Variety, Wolfram Schmidgen offers a fresh perspective on literary invention in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England...[T]he perspective of this book is generous and valuable and...readers of all persuasions interested in the early modern history of literature, culture and ideas will be thankful to it for its fertile insights and provocations." (The Seventeenth Century)