This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.
Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens all worked as parliamentary reporters, but their experiences in the press gallery have not received much scrutiny. Nikki Hessell's study is the first work to consider all four of these canonical writers as gallery reporters, providing a detailed picture of this intriguing episode in their careers. Hessell challenges preconceived notions about the role that emergent literary genius played in their success as reporters, arguing instead that they were consummate gallery professionals who adapted themselves to the journalistic standards of their day. That professional background fed in to their creative work in unexpected ways. By drawing on a wealth of evidence in letters, diaries and the press, this study provides fresh insights into the ways in which four great writers learnt the craft of journalism and brought those lessons to bear on their career as literary authors.
Focusing on the phenomenon of miniaturization in material culture, literature, and theories of cognition, this study examines the appeal and function of the small-scale during the period from 1650 to 1765. Drawing on three interconnected areas of scholarship, Melinda Alliker Rabb analyzes the human capacity to supplement direct experience of the world through representation, in order to gain knowledge of that world and to attempt control over it. Assessing two kinds of miniature - the real and the imagined - allows rethinking of works by Swift, Pope, Gay, Johnson, Sterne, and others, and shows how the fictional miniature can correspond meaningfully to the world of things. The phenomenon of scaling down objects as various as teapots, bureaus, globes, buckets, spoons, battlefields, and diving bells, has a relationship to large-scale events as various as financial revolution, globalization, scientific discovery, war and other events that challenge old modes of representation and demand new ones.
The essays in this volume do not claim that the Revolution of 1688-89 in itself constituted an epoch-making event in the history of progress and freedom. Instead, they argue that it marks an important conjunction of many trends, changes, and developments in the years before and after 1688.
English historians in the Middle Ages is an overview of the history of English historians and their works in the Middle Ages. English historians helped lay the groundwork for modern historical methodology, provided vital accounts of the early history of England, its culture, and revelations about the historians themselves.The most remarkable period of historical writting was during the High Middle Ages in the 12th and 13th centuries, when English chronicles produced works with a variety of interest, wealth of information and amplitude of range. However one might choose to view the reliability.
In this groundbreaking portrait of Samuel Johnson, Nokes positions the great thinker in his rightful place as an active force in the Enlightenment, not a mere recorder or performer, and demonstrates how his interaction with life impacted his work.
The papers brought together in this volume bear witness to the growing vigour and diversity of eighteenth-century studies. The seminar at which they were presented was held to honour the memory of a literary scholar, David Nichol Smith. It is therefore understandable and fitting that the majority of the contributions should be concerned primarily with literature. History, art, and philosophy, however, are also dealt with; and the collection as a whole offers a widely ranging and illuminating survey of the period.
Johnson was very close to Swift in the difficulties he had to face because of his poor health and difficult social positions. Both of these tortured men were able to impose their names on the two phases of 18th century life: The Age of Swift from 1700 to 1740 and the Age of Johnson to 1789. Swift predominated in the age of satire and Johnson in the age of biography and literary criticism.
