Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing
Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing

Author: Louise Curran

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-03-17

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1316495523

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This fascinating study examines Samuel Richardson's letters as important works of authorial self-fashioning. It analyses the development of his epistolary style; the links between his own letter-writing practice and that of his fictional protagonists; how his correspondence is highly conscious of the spectrum of publicity; and how he constructed his letter collections to form an epistolary archive for posterity. Looking backwards to earlier epistolary traditions, and forwards, to the emergence of the lives-in-letters mode of biography, the book places Richardson's correspondence in a historical continuum. It explores how the eighteenth century witnesses a transition, from a period in which an author would rarely preserve personal papers to a society in which the personal lives of writers become privileged as markers of authenticity in the expanded print market. It argues that Richardson's letters are shaped by this shifting relationship between correspondence and publicity in the mid-eighteenth century.

The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley
The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley

Author: Robert Dodsley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-01-22

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 9780521522083

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This fully annotated edition sheds much light on eighteenth-century British literary and publishing history.

Patriotism and Public Spirit
Patriotism and Public Spirit

Author: Ian Crowe

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-08-22

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0804783357

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Patriotism and Public Spirit is an innovative study of the formative influences shaping the early writings of the Irish-English statesman Edmund Burke and an early case-study of the relationship between the business of bookselling and the politics of criticism and persuasion. Through a radical reassessment of the impact of Burke's "Irishness" and of his relationship with the London-based publisher Robert Dodsley, the book argues that Burke saw Patriotism as the best way to combine public spirit with the reinforcement of civil order and to combat the use of coded partisan thinking to achieve the dominance of one section of the population over another. No other study has drawn so extensively on the literary and commercial network through which Burke's first writings were published to help explain them. By linking contemporary reinterpretations of the work of Patriot sympathizers and writers such as Alexander Pope and Lord Bolingbroke with generally neglected trends in religious and literary criticism in the Republic of Letters, this book provides new ways of understanding Burke's early publications. The results call into question fundamental assumptions about the course of "Enlightenment" thought and challenge currently dominant post-colonialist and Irish nationalist interpretations of the early Burke.