This book looks at how historical linguists accommodate the written records used for evidence. The limitations of the written record restrict our view of the past and the conclusions that we can draw about its language. However, the same limitations force us to be aware of the particularities of language. This collection blends the philological with the linguistic, combining questions of the particular with generalizations about language change.
This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.
Combining linguistic theory with analytical concepts and literary interpretation and appreciation, Jane Austen's Narrative Techniques traces the creation and development of Austen's narrative techniques. Massimiliano Morini employs the tools developed by post-war linguistics and above all pragmatics, the study of the ways in which speakers communicate meaning, since Austen's 'wordings' can only be interpreted within the fictional context of character-character, narrator-character, narrator-reader interaction. Examining a wide range of Austen texts, from her unpublished works through masterpieces like Mansfield Park and Emma, Morini discusses familiar Austen themes, using linguistic means to shed fresh light on the question of point of view in Austen and on Austen's much-admired brilliance in creating lively and plausible dialogue. Accessibly written and informed by the latest work in linguistic and literary studies, Jane Austen's Narrative Techniques offers Austen specialists a new avenue for understanding her narrative techniques and serves as a case study for scholars and students of pragmatics and applied linguistics.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield was a statesman, diplomat, man of letters and acclaimed wit of the eighteenth century. His winning manners and urbanity were praised by many, including Alexander Pope, John Gay and Voltaire. Although an accomplished essayist and epigrammatist, Chesterfield’s literary reputation today derives from ‘Letters to His Son’, as well as ‘Letters to His Godson’, which are in fact works of private correspondence and paternal and avuncular advice, never intended for publication. As a handbook for worldly success in the eighteenth century, they provide humorous, perceptive and nuanced advice for how a gentleman should conduct himself at all times. For the first time in digital printing, this eBook presents Chesterfield’s complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Chesterfield’s life * Concise introductions to the texts * All the celebrated Letters, with individual contents tables * Useful quotation editions of the more famous letters * Features many rare prose works for the first time in digital publishing * Excellent formatting of the texts * Rare poetry, speeches, dialogues and addresses only available in this eBook * Important essays from periodicals * Easily locate the texts you want to read * Features a bonus biography – discover Chesterfield’s literary life * Ordering of texts into chronological order and genres CONTENTS: The Letters The Drapier’s Letter to the Good People of Ireland (1745) Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774) Principles of Politeness and of Knowing the World (1786) Letters to His Godson (1890) Other Correspondence Letters, Sentences and Maxims (1903) Quotations from ‘Letters to His Son’ Other Prose Works Speeches in the House of Lords Miscellaneous Addresses and Other Works Essays in Periodicals Dialogues The Poetry Miscellaneous Verses The Biography Philip Dormer Stanhope (1900) by Sidney Lee
This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels advanced several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the self-possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Two contemporary models for the defining of selfhood through reference to property structure the book, one historical (classical republicanism and bourgeois individualism), and the other literary (pastoral and georgic). These paradigms offer a cultural context for the analysis of both canonical and less well-known writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West. While this study focuses on fiction from 1740–1800, it also draws on the historiography, literary criticism and philosophy of the period, and on recent feminist and cultural studies.
Nonfiction books for children—from biographies and historical accounts of communities and events to works on science and social justice—have traditionally been most highly valued by educators and parents for their factual accuracy. This approach, however, misses an opportunity for young readers to participate in the generation and testing of information. In A Literature of Questions, Joe Sutliff Sanders offers an innovative theoretical approach to children’s nonfiction that goes beyond an assessment of a work’s veracity to develop a book’s equivocation as a basis for interpretation. Addressing how such works are either vulnerable or resistant to critical engagement, Sanders pays special attention to the attributes that nonfiction shares with other forms of literature, including voice and character, and those that play a special role in the genre, such as peritexts and photography. The first book-length work to theorize children’s nonfiction as nonfiction from a literary perspective, A Literature of Questions carefully explains how the genre speaks in unique ways to its young readers and how it invites them to the project of understanding. At the same time, it clearly lays out a series of techniques for analysis, which it then applies and nuances through extensive close readings and case studies of books published over the past half century, including recent award-winning books such as Tanya Lee Stone’s Almost Astronauts: Thirteen Women Who Dared to Dream and We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson. By looking at a text’s willingness or reluctance to let children interrogate its information and ideological context, Sanders reveals how nonfiction can make young readers part of the project of learning rather than passive recipients of information.