This multi-disciplinary essay collection explores the controversial life and achievements of Sir John Hill (1714–1775), a prolific contributor to Georgian England’s literature, medicine and science. By the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. In 1750s London he was a celebrity, but he was also widely vilified. Hill, an important writer of urban space, also helped define London through his periodicals and fictions. As well as examining his significance and achievements, this book makes Hill a means of exploring the lively intellectual and public world of London in the 1750s where rivalries abounded, and where clubs, societies, coffee-houses, theatres and pleasure gardens shaped fame and fortunes. By investigating one individual’s intersections with his metropolis, Fame and Fortune restores Hill to view and contributes new understandings of the forms and functions of eighteenth-century intellectual worlds.
Seeking to honor and extend the critical legacy of Howard Weinbrot, this volume re-examines, rebuilds, and upgrades the most prominent pillars of long eighteenth-century scholarship. The collection is divided into four thematic sections, beginning with a series of chapters offering fresh analyses of Swift, Dryden, Hogarth, and other major authors and artists of the period. In the sections that follow, the contributors not only explore biographies of both highly esteemed figures and notorious deviants, but also investigate the very concept of Enlightenment as it has evolved from the eighteenth century to today. The final section features chapters that probe the complex interaction of identity, persona, and place, traversing the countless locales in which the British—and the international—eighteenth century emerged. The volume ultimately covers a range of experience that extends from the gallows to the landscape garden and from heroic antiquity to Romantic-era France. Juxtaposing the local and particular against the grand and universal, Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment testifies to the complexity and ongoing significance of eighteenth-century culture.
This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility’s ‘Man of Feeling’, the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters.
Eighteenth century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.
John Clare (1793–1864) has long been recognized as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam ‒ a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.
Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne derives from the Laurence Sterne Tercentenary Conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on July 8–11, 2013. It was attended by some eighty scholars from fourteen countries; the conference heard more than sixty papers. The organizers invited participants to submit revised versions of their contributions for this volume, and the thirteen selected exhibit, it is hoped, the defining features both of the conference and of Sterne studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is worth remarking that the selected authors represent seven countries; that Sterne may well be the most internationally accepted of all eighteenth-century English authors is certainly a claim worthy of a sentimental traveler. This collection recognizes three faces of Sterne, beginning with several biographical essays examining, respectively, his celebrity status, family life, politics, and philosophy. The second face is that of Tristram, studied from vantage points provided by ethics, linguistics, gender studies, and comparative literature. The final group of essays examines the face of Yorick as the protagonist of A Sentimental Journey, beginning with an ethnographic study of relationships, moving through questions of identity, and concluding with the possible future of literary studies—a return to aesthetics.
Recent years have witnessed a growing fascination with the printed annotations accompanying eighteenth-century texts. Previous studies of annotation have revealed the margins as dynamic textual spaces both shaping and shaped by diverse aesthetic, historical, and political sensibilities. Yet previous studies have also been restricted to notes by or for canonical figures; they have neglected annotation’s relation to developments in reading audiences and the book trade; and they have overlooked the interaction, even tension, between prose notes and poetry, a tension reflecting eighteenth-century views of poetry as aesthetically superior to prose. Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry addresses these oversights through a substantial introduction and eleven essays analyzing the printed endnotes and footnotes accompanying poems written or annotated between 1700 and 1830. Drawing on methods and critical developments in book history and print culture studies, this collection explores the functions that annotation performed on and through the printed page. By analyzing the annotation specific to poetry, these essays clarify the functions of notes among the other paratexts, including illustrations, by which scholars have mapped poetry’s relation to the expanding book trade and the class-specific production of different formats. Because the reading and writing of poetry boasted social and pedagogical functions that predate the rise of the note as a print technology, studying the relation of notes to poetry also reveals how the evolving layout of the eighteenth-century book wrought significant changes not only on reading practices and reception, but on the techniques that booksellers used to make new poems, steady-sellers, and antiquarian discoveries legible to new readers. Above all, analyzing notes in poetry volumes contributes to larger inquiries into canon formation and the rise of literary studies as a discipline in the eighteenth century.
The next volume in the distinguished Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson comprises prefaces, proposals, dedications, appeals, and other works that Johnson wrote for friends and acquaintances. The English critic, biographer, and poet Samuel Johnson was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth century. This twentieth and final volume of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson presents the author's occasional writings, including prefaces, proposals, dedications, introductions, book reviews, public letters, appeals, and school exercises. Notably, it includes the letters and addresses that Johnson wrote for the convicted clergyman William Dodd. Edited by O M Brack, Jr., and Robert DeMaria, Jr., this volume brings a treasure trove of Johnson's lesser-known writings to a contemporary audience.