Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel
Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel

Author: Jason H. Pearl

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0813936241

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Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period’s substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel’s realism and in particular the genre’s awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demystify blank spaces on the map and make utopia available anywhere. This literature incorporated, debunked, and reformulated utopian conceptions of geography. Reports of ideal societies have always prompted skepticism, and it is now common to imagine them in the future, rather than on some undiscovered island or continent. At precisely the time when novels began turning from the fabulous settings of romance to the actual locations described in contemporaneous travel accounts, a number of writers nevertheless tried to preserve and reconfigure utopia by giving it new coordinates and parameters. Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others told of adventurous voyages and extraordinary worlds. They engaged critically and creatively with the idea of utopia. If these writers ultimately concede that utopian geographies were nowhere to be found, they also reimagine the essential ideals as new forms of interiority and sociability that could be brought back to England. Questions about geography and utopia drove many of the formal innovations of the early novel. As this book shows, what resulted were new ways of representing both world geography and utopian possibility.

ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME: JONATHAN SWIFT
ACROSS BORDERS AND TIME: JONATHAN SWIFT

Author: Csaba Maczelka

Publisher: SPECHEL e-ditions

Published: 2022-12-16

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 6150061493

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The volume Across Borders and Time: Jonathan Swift contains the papers delivered at the conference The World of Swift; Swift and his World, which was dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift. The conference was held on 24-25 November 2017, at the House of Arts and Literature, Pécs, and jointly organised by the Institute of English Studies of Pécs University and SPECHEL, the latter of which is also the publisher of this volume in its series, SPECHEL e-ditions. It also benefited from the support provided by the Irish Embassy in Budapest. That year also marked the 650th anniversary of Hungary’s first university, founded in Pécs in 1367, and so the conference honoured that event, too. In this, the fifth SPECHEL e-dition, series editor Rouse joins up once again with SPECHEL member Gabriella Hartvig, an internationally respected scholar of the period and colleague at Pécs University, together with Irish Swiftian scholar David Clare. The volume comprises a selection of essays emanating from papers delivered at the conference celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift, held in the anniversary year of 2017, and includes a paper delivered by the Irish Ambassador to Hungary that opened the conference. We are grateful to the Irish Embassy for their financial support, as well as to a number of local businesses and the Mayor’s Office of Pécs. The conference was organised by SPECHEL as part of the British and Irish Autumn 2017 series of events, and included a recital of the music of the Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738).

Literary Geography
Literary Geography

Author: Lynn M. Houston

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1440842558

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This reference investigates the role of landscape in popular works and in doing so explores the time in which they were written. Literary Geography: An Encyclopedia of Real and Imagined Settings is an authoritative guide for students, teachers, and avid readers who seek to understand the importance of setting in interpreting works of literature, including poetry. By examining how authors and poets shaped their literary landscapes in such works as The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four, readers will discover historical, political, and cultural context hidden within the words of their favorite reads. The alphabetically arranged entries provide easy access to analysis of some of the most well-known and frequently assigned pieces of literature and poetry. Entries begin with a brief introduction to the featured piece of literature and then answer the questions: "How is literary landscape used to shape the story?"; "How is the literary landscape imbued with the geographical, political, cultural, and historical context of the author's contemporary world, whether purposeful or not?" Pop-up boxes provide quotes about literary landscapes throughout the book, and an appendix takes a brief look at the places writers congregated and that inspired them. A comprehensive scholarly bibliography of secondary sources pertaining to mapping, physical and cultural geography, ecocriticism, and the role of nature in literature rounds out the work.

Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century
Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Katrin Berndt

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-07-18

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 3110650444

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The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.

The Wreckage of Intentions
The Wreckage of Intentions

Author: David Alff

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-09-12

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0812294459

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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain saw the proposal of so many endeavors called "projects"—a catchphrase for the daring, sometimes dangerous practice of shaping the future—that Daniel Defoe dubbed his era a "Projecting Age." These ideas spanned a wide variety of scientific, technological, and intellectual interventions intended for the betterment of England. But for all the fanfare surrounding them, few such schemes actually materialized, leaving scores of defunct visions, from Defoe's own attempt to farm cats for perfume, to Mary Astell's proposal to charter a college for women, to countless ventures for improving land, streamlining government, and inventing new consumer goods. Taken together, these failed plans form a compelling alternative history of a Britain that might have been. The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive and critical account of projects, exploring the historical memory surrounding these concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. Using methods of literary analysis, David Alff shows how projects began as written proposals, circulated as print objects, spurred physical undertakings, and provoked responses in the realms of poetry, fiction, and drama. Mapping this process discloses the ways in which eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals and, in so doing, devised new ways of seeing the world through its future potential. Approaching old projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas they left behind, Alff contends this vision was, and remains, vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.

The Oxford English Literary History
The Oxford English Literary History

Author: Margaret J. M. Ezell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 0192537830

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The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This volume covers the period 1645-1714, and removes the traditional literary period labels and boundaries used in earlier studies to categorize the literary culture of late seventeenth-century England. It invites readers to explore the continuities and the literary innovations occurring during six turbulent decades, as English readers and writers lived through unprecedented events including a King tried and executed by Parliament and another exiled, the creation of the national entity 'Great Britain', and an expanding English awareness of the New World as well as encounters with the cultures of Asia and the subcontinent. The period saw the establishment of new concepts of authorship and it saw a dramatic increase of women working as professional, commercial writers. London theatres closed by law in 1642 reopened with new forms of entertainments from musical theatrical spectaculars to contemporary comedies of manners with celebrity actors and actresses. Emerging literary forms such as epistolary fictions and topical essays were circulated and promoted by new media including newspapers, periodical publications, and advertising and laws were changing governing censorship and taking the initial steps in the development of copyright. It was a period which produced some of the most profound and influential literary expressions of religious faith from John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, while simultaneously giving rise to a culture of libertinism and savage polemical satire, as well as fostering the new dispassionate discourses of experimental sciences and the conventions of popular romance.

The Oxford English Literary History
The Oxford English Literary History

Author: Jonathan Bate

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 0198183119

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The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. This volume covers 1645 to 1714, which saw the rise of new media forms, and transformations in performance spaces, bookselling, and the concept of authorship.

Utopia and Its Discontents
Utopia and Its Discontents

Author: Sebastian Mitchell

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1441136339

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Utopia and Its Discontents traces literary representations of ideal communities from Plato to the 21st century. Each chapter offers close readings of key utopian and anti-utopian texts to demonstrate how they construct, challenge and explore the ideas and forms of earlier utopian writings and the social and political ideals of their own periods. In this original and insightful study, Sebastian Mitchell demonstrates how literary utopias are often as much about the past as they are about the present and the future. Utopia and Its Discontents concludes by arguing against the idea that the utopian has been eclipsed by the dystopian in contemporary culture. Topics covered include: - Early political and philosophical authors, such as Plato and Thomas More - Literary works, from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - Speculative-fiction writers such as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood - Ecological and feminist texts by Ernest Callenbach, Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy - Twenty-first century utopianism This is an essential study for scholars and students of utopian literature.

Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750
Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569-1750

Author: Judy A. Hayden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1317006518

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The focus of this volume is the intersection and the cross-fertilization between the travel narrative, literary discourse, and the New Philosophy in the early modern to early eighteenth-century historical periods. Contributors examine how, in an historical era which realized an emphasis on nation and during a time when exploration was laying the foundation for empire, science and the literary discourse of the travel narrative become intrinsically linked. Together, the essays in this collection point out the way in which travel narratives reflect the anxiety from changes brought about through the discoveries of the 'new knowledge' and the way this knowledge in turn provided a new and more complex understanding of the expanding world in which the writers lived. The worlds in this text are many (for no 'world' is monomial), from the antipodes to the New World, from the heavens to the seas, and from fictional worlds to the world which contains and/or constructs one's nation and empire. All of these essays demonstrate the manner in which the New Philosophy dramatically changed literary discourse.

Travel and Travail
Travel and Travail

Author: Patricia Akhimie

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 149621031X

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Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.