Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues
Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues

Author: Stuart Sim

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0748631313

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This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially?The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the 'long' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time.

Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-century Literature
Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-century Literature

Author: Liisa Steinby

Publisher: Crossing Boundaries: Turku Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9789089648747

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This collection of essays studies the encounter between allegedly ahistorical concepts of narratology and eighteenth-century literature. It questions whether the general concepts of narratology are as such applicable to historically specific fields, or whether they need further specification. Furthermore, at issue is the question whether the theoretical concepts actually are, despite their appearance of ahistorical generality, derived from the historical study of a particular period and type of literature. In the essays such concepts as genre, plot, character, event, tellability, perspective, temporality, description, reading, metadiegetic narration, and paratext are scrutinized in the context of eighteenth-century texts. The writers include some of the leading theorists of both narratology and eighteenth-century literature.

The Social Life of Books
The Social Life of Books

Author: Abigail Williams

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-06-27

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0300228104

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“A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel
The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Author: J. A. Downie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 0199566747

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The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth Century Novel is the first published book to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. It is an indispensible resource for those with an interest in the history of the novel.

Smell in Eighteenth-Century England
Smell in Eighteenth-Century England

Author: William Tullett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0192582453

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In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny, and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell's emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odour a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them, from paint and perfume to onions and farts. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, Tullett demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell's asocial-sociability, and its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society.

The Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook
The Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook

Author: Gary Day

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-09-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1441163905

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Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: • Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts • Guides to key critics, concepts and topics • An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research • Case studies in reading literary and critical texts • Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. The Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook is an invaluable introduction to literature and culture in the eighteenth century.

Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century
Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: A. Ingram

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0230306594

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Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering. It also asks what present-day society can learn about depression from the eighteenth-century experience.

The Eighteenth-century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics
The Eighteenth-century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics

Author: Carol Ann Stewart

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780754663485

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Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen shed light on the literary marketplace and the status of writers.

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Author: John Richetti

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-09-05

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1139825046

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In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

Views on Eighteenth Century Culture
Views on Eighteenth Century Culture

Author: Luís Manuel A. V. Bernardo

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-10-19

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 1443884987

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This book provides significant new insights into the Enlightenment in Portugal and its relationships with other European cultural movements using Eugénio dos Santos (1711–1760) as a common reference point. Eugénio dos Santos was a Portuguese architect and city planner who, among other projects, was responsible for the plans to rebuild Lisbon after the earthquake of 1st November 1755. His artistic and technical training, architectural production, aesthetic preferences and some of the books in his private library point to a person who embodied the transition between two moments in Portuguese culture, with their specific characteristics and particular reception of the practices and ideas that circulated among European intellectuals and practitioners. Over the 18 chapters of this volume, several specialists in different disciplinary areas discuss ideas, libraries, printed and handwritten documents, drawings, printing techniques, and architects, philosophers and writers of the 18th century, in order to offer a broad view of a time period closely associated with the construction of modernity.