Infinite Variety

Infinite Variety offers an intellectual history of literary invention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that the religious, political, and scientific revolutions of the preceding half century changed the way writers thought about the relationship between order and invention. Jointly, these revolutions helped foster the sense of a disorder of kinds that challenged the hierarchies that had seemed to organize nature and society. This sense converged around the mushrooming ofnew religious kinds in the seventeenth century (Quakers, Seekers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Deists, Socinians, etc.); the emergence of political parties in the 1680s and 1690s (Whig, Tory, Country, Low Church, High Church); the booming discovery of new animals and plants from distant and not-so-distant locations; and the demonstration by scientists that new kinds could be created experimentally--