A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
This study interprets eighteenth-century satire’s famous typographical obsession as a fraught response to the Enlightenment’s "ocularcentric" epistemological paradigms, as well as to a print-cultural moment identified by book-historians as increasingly "visual" — a moment at which widespread attention was being paid, for the first time, to format, layout, and eye-catching advertising strategies. On the one hand, the Augustans were convinced of the ability of their elaborately printed texts to function as a kind of optical machinery rivaling that of the New Science, enhancing readers’ physical but also moral vision. On the other hand, they feared that an overly scrutinizing gaze might undermine the viewer’s natural faculty for candor and sympathy, delight and desire. In readings of Pope, Swift, and Montagu, Mannheimer shows how this distrust of the empirical gaze led to a reconsideration of the ethics, and most specifically the gender politics, of ocularcentrism. Whereas Montagu effected this reconsideration by directly satirizing both the era’s faith in the visual and its attendant publishing strategies, Pope and Swift pursued their critique via print itself: thus whether via facing-page translations, fictional editors, or disingenuous footnotes, these writers sought to ensure that typography never became either a mere tool of (or target for) the objectifying gaze, but rather that it remained a dynamic and interactive medium by which readers could learn both to see and to see themselves seeing.
This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras; it is also noted for new forms and preoccupations engendered by the cultural, philosophical, and political concerns of the time, including democratizing revolutions, increasing secularization, and growing emphasis on individualism. Discussions emphasize the period's stage comedy and acknowledge comic expression in various forms of print media including the emerging literary form we now know as the novel. Contributions from scholars reflect a wide variety of interests in the field of 18th-century studies, and the inclusion of a generous number of illustrations throughout demonstrates that the period's visual culture was also an important part of the Enlightenment comic landscape. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to Enlightenment comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
The specially commissioned essays in Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 address the multiplicity of female poetic practice and the public image of the woman poet between the Restoration and mid-eighteenth century. The volume includes biographically informative accounts of individual poets alongside detailed essays which discuss the different contexts and poetic traditions shaping women's poetry in this key period in literary history. Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 draws together a wealth of recent scholarship from a strong cast of contributors (including Germaine Greer) into one accessible volume aimed at both students and specialist readers.
Gender is an often misunderstood subject area, even within the discipline even to those who teach and write about it. One of my presenters, when she first approached me to present at the conference, asked, “What does my paper really have to do with gender”? To me the answer was obvious; everything has to do with gender. Gender is everywhere from the cradle to the grave. What color blanket are we given at birth? What clothes are we laid out in at death? We are bombarded with advertisements specifically targeted at our gender, either male, female, or somewhere in between. We are judged by our gender, which is often synonymous with our sex, although in many of the presentations through the years it is becoming evident that more and more people understand the difference. Our clothing, food, entertainment, and reading material are all tied to gender, in one form or another. Gender is like the air. It is all around us, seldom thought of, but always present. In an area that spans literature, politics, sex, religion, and personal choices it is hard to get finite and clear cut delineations. The contributors are the main focus here and I have just been the ringmaster of this incredible circus of ideas. Without them this could never have gone to press and it is all our hopes that you enjoy the volume and take something away from it that you did not anticipate.
By identifying a pervasive cultivation of attention as a perceptual and cognitive state in eighteenth-century poetry, this book explores overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention.
A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).
Immensely learned, self-educated in an era when formal schooling was denied to women, Mary Wortley Montagu was an admired poet, a consistently scandalous doyenne of eighteenth-century London society, and, in a period when letter-writing had been elevated to an art form, one of the greatest letter writers in the English language. Her epistles, meant for both public and private consumption, are the product of a mind distinguished by its adventurousness, its indifference to convention, and its eagerness not only to acquire knowledge but to convey it with unmitigated style and grace. (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
The poetry of the mid- and late-eighteenth century has long been regarded as primarily private and apolitical; in this wide-ranging study Dustin Griffin argues that in fact the poets of the period were addressing the great issues of national life--rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, an emerging new British national identity. Taking up the topic of patriotic verse, Griffin shows that poets such as Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of true patriotism.
This is the first complete edition of the works of William Congreve (1670-1729), one of Britain's most important literary figures. The texts of the plays, novel, poetry, opera, and letters are presented in original spelling. The editor, D.F. McKenzie, has added his own thorough notes at the end of each volume.