The Age of Projects - 9780802098733

The Age of ProjectsAuthor(s): Maximillian E. Novak\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: University of Toronto Press, Canada\nImprint: University of Toronto Press\nISBN-13: 9780802098733, 978-0802098733\nSynopsis\n\""The Projecting Age\"" was a term the English novelist Daniel Defoe used to describe the end of the seventeenth century. This term could just as easily be used, however, to describe the period known as the \""Long Eighteenth Century\"" [tel]. The Age of Projects uses the notion of a project as a key to understanding the massive social, cultural, political, literary, and scientific transitions that occurred in Europe during this time.\n\nThe contributors to this collection examine fraudulent, grandiose, altruistic, and idealistic projects that reveal the period's radical breaks from the past and its preoccupation with the future. Examining topics as diverse as Jonathan Swift's satire on the possibility of a computer, to Gottfried Leibniz's effort to build one, and Edmund Burke's predi.