Literary Spinoza | The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza | Oxford Academic

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author of ten books, the latest of which is Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. She is Visiting Professor of Philosophy and English at New York University, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New College of the Humanities, London England. This chapter focuses on literary artists—that is, novelists, poets, and playwrights—who have shown fascination with Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. The fictionalization of Spinoza’s life begins during the Enlightenment period and continues until today. The multifaceted literary attraction to Spinoza becomes only more remarkable when one considers how little it was reciprocated. For all the attention that literary artists have paid to Spinoza, he appears to have accorded little thought to the arts. This chapter first examines why Spinoza has paid little attention to the arts before turning to literary figures who have made Spinoza the central character of their work, including Gotthold Lessing, Joh

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• Megan Luong