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

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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

Appalachian Pastoral
Appalachian Pastoral

Author: Michael S. Martin

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-10-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1638040192

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This project overall attempts to recast Appalachian literature in terms of a ‘lost tradition’ of texts that are generally out-of-print though of central importance to understanding the history of the region and its current environmental and cultural challenges. The epilogue will also consider the way that ecological-based literary criticism offers a vital language for how antebellum travel writers sought to frame the region from a 19th-century environmental point of view. The book aims to resituate the field of Appalachian Studies to an earlier historic genesis in the 19th-century and bring to light several books which have received scant scholarly attention in the canon of Appalachian and American literature, respectively. The book centers on the argument that mid-19th-century travel writers going through or from the Appalachian region drew on familiar versions of 18th-century European, mainly British, landscape aesthetics that would help make the readerly experience less alien to their erudite regional and Northern audiences. These travel writers, such as Philip Pendleton Kennedy and David Hunter Strother, consciously appropriated such aesthetic tropes as the pastoral as a way to further dramatic the effect in their nonfiction accounts of Appalachia, while the reader could find such references comforting as they considered whether to domesticate or tour the Appalachian region.

Eighteenth Century English Literature
Eighteenth Century English Literature

Author: Charlotte Sussman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0745637205

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This engaging book introduces new readers of eighteenth-century texts to some of the major works, authors, and debates of a key period of literary history. Rather than simply providing a chronological survey of the era, this book analyzes the impact of significant cultural developments on literary themes and forms - including urbanization, colonial, and mercantile expansion, the emergence of the "public sphere," and changes in sex and gender roles. In eighteenth-century Britain, many of the things we take for granted about modern life were shockingly new: women appeared for the first time on stage; the novel began to dominate the literary marketplace; people entertained the possibility that all human beings were created equal, and tentatively proposed that reason could triumph over superstition; ministers became more powerful than kings, and the consumer emerged as a political force. Eighteenth-Century English Literature: 1660-1789 explores these issues in relation to well-known works by such authors as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, and Sterne, while also bringing attention to less familiar figures, such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Leapor, and Olaudah Equiano. It offers both an ideal introduction for students and a fresh approach for those with research interests in the period.

Literary Historicity
Literary Historicity

Author: Ruth Mack

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0804759111

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Literary Historicity explores how eighteenth-century British writers considered the past as an aspect of experience. Mack moves between close examinations of literature, historiography, and recent philosophical writing on history, offering a new view of eighteenth-century philosophies of history in Britain. Such philosophies, she argues, could be important literarily without being focused, as has been assumed, on questions of fact and fiction. Eighteenth-century writers—like many twentieth-century philosophers—often used literary form not in order to exhibit a work's fictional status but in order to consider what the relation between the past and present might be. Literary Historicity portrays a British Enlightenment that both embraces the possibility of historical experience and interrogates the terms for such experience, one deeply engaged with historical consciousness not as an inevitability of the modern world, but as something to be understood within it.

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.

The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
The Origins of the English Marriage Plot

Author: Lisa O'Connell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1108485685

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Examines how and why marriage plots became the English novel's most popular form in the eighteenth century. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English literature and culture as well as feminist literary history.

The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature
The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature

Author: Yvonne Bezrucka

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-09

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781527570931

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Free, romantic, and individualistic, Britainâ (TM)s self-image in the eighteenth century constructs itself in opposition to the dominant power of a southern European aesthetics. Offering a fresh understanding of how the British intelligentsia created a â ~Northernâ (TM) aesthetics to challenge the European yoke, this book explores the roots of British Romanticism and a newly created past. Literature, the arts, architecture, and gardening all contributed to the creation of this national, â ~enlightenedâ (TM), Northern cultural environment, with its emphasis on a home-grown legal tradition, on a heroic Celtic past, and on the imagined democracy of King Arthur and his Roundtable of Knights as a prophetic precursor of Constitutional Monarchy. Set against the European Grand Tour, the British turned to the Domestic, Picturesque Anti-Grand-Tour, and alongside a classical literary heritage championed British authors and British empiricism, against continental religion that sanctioned an authoritarian politics that the Gothic Novel mocks. However, if empiricism and common law were vital to this emerging tradition, so too was the other driving force of Britainâ (TM)s medieval inheritance, the fantasy world of mythic heroes and a celebration of what would come to be known as the â ~fairy way of writingâ (TM).

Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry
Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry

Author: John Goodridge

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0521433819

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Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has begun to offer a radically new dimension to our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. In this important new study John Goodridge offers a detailed reading of key rural poems of the period, examines the ways in which eighteenth-century poets adapted Virgilian Georgic models, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments. Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labour by James Thomson, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of one of the largely forgotten didactic epics of the eighteenth century, John Dyer's The Fleece. Through an exploration of the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, Goodridge breaks through the often brittle surface of eighteenth-century poetry, to show how it reflects the ideologies and realities of contemporary life.