New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction
New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Author: Christopher D. Johnson

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2011-04-18

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1611490413

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New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction is a collection of thirteen essays honoring Professor Jerry C. Beasley, who retired from the University of Delaware in 2005. The essays, written by friends, collaborators and former students, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Professor Beasley's career and point to new directions of critical inquiry. The initial essays, which discuss Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Samuel Richardson, suggest new directions in biographical writing, including the intriguing discourse of 'life writing' explored by Paula Backscheider. Subsequent essays enrich understandings of eighteenth-century fiction by examining lesser-known works by Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox. Many of the essays, especially those that focus on Smollett, use political pamphlets, material artifacts, and urban legends to place familiar novels in new contexts. The collection's final essay demonstrates the vital importance of bibliographic study.

Before Novels
Before Novels

Author: J. Paul Hunter

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780393308617

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"By taking a close look at materials no previous twentieth-century critic has seriously investigated in literary terms--ephemeral journalism, moralistic tracts, questions-and-answer columns, 'wonder' narratives--Paul Hunter discovers a tangled set of roots for the early novel. His provocative argument for a new historicized understanding of the genre and its early readers brilliantly reveals unexpected affinities." --Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia

The Eighteenth Century
The Eighteenth Century

Author: James Sambrook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1317893247

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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.

A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture
A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture

Author: Paula R. Backscheider

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2009-10-19

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 1405192453

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A Companion to the Eighteenth-century Novel furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral contexts. An up-to-date resource for the study of the eighteenth-century novel Furnishes readers with a sophisticated vision of the eighteenth-century novel in its political, aesthetic, and moral context Foregrounds those topics of most historical and political relevance to the twenty-first century Explores formative influences on the eighteenth-century novel, its engagement with the major issues and philosophies of the period, and its lasting legacy Covers both traditional themes, such as narrative authority and print culture, and cutting-edge topics, such as globalization, nationhood, technology, and science Considers both canonical and non-canonical literature

Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context
Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context

Author: Dr Christina Ionescu

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2014-02-28

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1472413318

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Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.

Graveyard Poetry
Graveyard Poetry

Author: Dr Eric Parisot

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1472402197

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While immensely popular in the eighteenth century, current critical wisdom regards graveyard poetry as a short-lived fad with little lasting merit. In the first book-length study of this important poetic mode, Eric Parisot suggests, to the contrary, that graveyard poetry is closely connected to the mid-century aesthetic revision of poetics. Graveyard poetry's contribution to this paradigm shift, Parisot argues, stems from changing religious practices and their increasing reliance on printed material to facilitate private devotion by way of affective and subjective response. Coupling this perspective with graveyard poetry’s obsessive preoccupation with death and salvation makes visible its importance as an articulation or negotiation between contemporary religious concerns and emerging aesthetics of poetic practice. Parisot reads the poetry of Robert Blair, Edward Young and Thomas Gray, among others, as a series of poetic experiments that attempt to accommodate changing religious and reading practices and translate religious concerns into parallel reconsiderations of poetic authority, agency, death and afterlife. Making use of an impressive body of religious treatises, sermons and verse that ground his study in a precise historical moment, Parisot shows graveyard poetry's strong ties to seventeenth-century devotional texts, and most importantly, its influential role in the development of late eighteenth-century sentimentalism and Romanticism.

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

Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions
Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions

Author: Maaja A. Stewart

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 9780820315409

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"In Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions, Maaja A. Stewart juxtaposes the discourses of late eighteenth-century domesticity and imperialism to provide an original and compelling reading of Jane Austen's novels. Stewart contends that the sphere of domesticity largely associated with women during this era was constructed alongside - and in complex relation to - the changing socioeconomic conditions of England as a whole. At the center of these changing conditions was the British drive toward empire." "Stewart's double focus on home and empire illuminates the varied ways in which imperialism penetrated the daily lives of women, who were deceptively represented as being largely untouched by England's overseas trade, its conquest of India, and its cultivation of West Indian slave plantations. This focus also illuminates the challenge the imperial enterprise posed to social and ethical systems of the gentry." "Stewart's concrete point of entry to this material is a central narrative in Austen's novels - the struggle for mastery between the older son who inherits the traditional estate and the younger sons who enter various colonial services, gain wealth, and return to contest the supremacy of the older brother. This contest, Stewart argues, transforms the traditional paternal country house into a maternal domestic space. In this context, domesticity reveals itself to be a compensatory realm, a world of denials and false appearances, where the brute realities of imperial domination could be symbolically transformed. By situating the ideologically charged domestic space in the larger context of British imperialism, Stewart shows how the construction of female subjectivity and female virtue were both an antidote to and a mask for colonial aggression." "Stewart's approach - poststructuralist, postcolonial, and intertextual - yields a revisionary rereading of Austen's novels. The model she offers can also be used to reread texts other than Austen's and thus invites a fresh examination of the dominant cultural discourses at the beginning of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved