A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature

A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Author: John Richetti

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1119082129

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is a lively exploration of one of the most diverse and innovative periods in literary history. Capturing the richness and excitement of the era, this book provides extensive coverage of major authors, poets, dramatists, and journalists of the period, such as Dryden, Pope and Swift, while also exploring the works of important writers who have received less attention by modern scholars, such as Matthew Prior and Charles Churchill. Uniquely, the book also discusses noncanonical, working-class writers and demotic works of the era. During the eighteenth-century, Britain experienced vast social, political, economic, and existential changes, greatly influencing the literary world. The major forms of verse, poetry, fiction and non-fiction, experimental works, drama, and political prose from writers such as Montagu, Finch, Johnson, Goldsmith and Cowper, are discussed here in relation to their historical context. A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of English literature. Topics covered include: Verse in the early 18th century, from Pope, Gay, and Swift to Addison, Defoe, Montagu, and Finch Poetry from the mid- to late-century, highlighting the works of Johnson, Gray, Collins, Smart, Goldsmith, and Cowper among others, as well as women and working-class poets Prose Fiction in the early and 18th century, including Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett The novel past mid-century, including experimental works by Johnson, Sterne, Mackenzie, Walpole, Goldsmith, and Burney Non-fiction prose, including political and polemical prose 18th century drama


Candide

Candide

Author: By Voltaire

Publisher: BookRix

Published: 2019-06-10

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 3736801785

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Candide is a French satire by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply Optimism) by his mentor, Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". Candide is characterized by its sarcastic tone, as well as by its erratic, fantastical and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is mordantly matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. As philosophers of Voltaire's day contended with the problem of evil, so too does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers through allegory; most conspicuously, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism. As expected by Voltaire, Candide has enjoyed both great success and great scandal. Immediately after its secretive publication, the book was widely banned because it contained religious blasphemy, political sedition and intellectual hostility hidden under a thin veil of naïveté. However, with its sharp wit and insightful portrayal of the human condition, the novel has since inspired many later authors and artists to mimic and adapt it. Today, Candide is recognized as Voltaire's magnum opus and is often listed as part of the Western canon; it is arguably taught more than any other work of French literature. It was listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.


The Eighteenth Century

The Eighteenth Century

Author: James Sambrook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1317893247

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is an impressive and lucid survey of eighteenth-century intellectual life, providing a real sense of the complexity of the age and of the cultural and intellectual climate in which imaginative literature flourished. It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as 'Augustan Age', 'Age of Enlightenment' and 'Age of Reason', which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.


"Cultures of Whiggism"

Author: David Womersley

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780874138962

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope noted that his age was one of Parties, both in Wit and State. Much scholarship has been devoted to the complexities of the political parties of the eighteenth century, but there has been a surprising reluctance to explore what Pope implied were the corollaries of those parties, namely, parties in literature. The essays collected here explore the literary culture that arose from and supported what Pitt the Elder referred to as the great spirit of Whiggism that animated English politics during the eighteenth century. From the prehistory of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the French Revolution in the 1790s, the interactions between Whiggish politics and literature are sampled and described in groundbreaking essays that range widely across the fields of eighteenth-century political prose, poetry, and the novel.


Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Author: Hazel Wilkinson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-30

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1107199557

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first comprehensive study of the eighteenth-century response to the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, from editions to influence.


English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789

English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789

Author: David Fairer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-13

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1317892887

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer’s book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional understanding of the subject. This book seeks to question some of the structures, categories, and labels that have given the age its reassuring shape in literary history. In doing so Fairer offers a fresh and detailed look at a wide range of material.


The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Author: John Sitter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-10-06

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1139502468

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700–1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed analyses of individual works by poets from Finch, Swift and Pope, to Gray, Cowper and Barbauld. An approachable introduction to English poetry and major poets of the eighteenth century, this book provides a grounding in poetic analysis useful to students and general readers of literature.


Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century

Words, Books, Images, and the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9027258449

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The essays collected in this volume engage in a conversation among lexicography, the culture of the book, and the canonization and commemoration of English literary figures and their works in the long eighteenth century. The source of inspiration for each piece is Allen Reddick’s scholarship on Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great English lexicographer whose Dictionary (1755) included thousands upon thousands of illustrative quotations from the “best” authors, and, more recently, on Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), the much less well-known bibliophile who sent gifts of books by a pantheon of Whig authors to individuals and libraries in Britain, Protestant bastions in continental Europe, and America. Between the covers of Words, Books, Images readers will encounter canonical English authors of prose and poetry—Bacon, Milton, Defoe, Dryden, Pope, Richardson, Swift, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Edward Lear. But they will also become acquainted with the agents of their canonization and commemoration—the printers and publishers of Grub Street, the biographer John Aubrey, the lexicographer and biographer Johnson, the bibliophile Hollis, and the portrait painter Reynolds. No less crucially, they will meet fellow readers of then and now—women and men who peruse, poach, snip, and savour a book’s every word and image.