You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
There anchoring, Peter chose from Man to hide, There hang his Head, and view the lazy Tide In its hot slimy Channel slowly glide. . . George Crabbe, eighteenth-century poet, clergyman and surgeon-apothecary, is best known for ‘Peter Grimes’, the tale of a sadistic fisherman that inspired Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name. The brutal crimes and ‘tortur’d guilt’ of Grimes play out within the bleak, improbably beautiful setting of Aldeburgh. While Crabbe has fallen in and out of fashion, the Suffolk town and its landscape have continued to captivate writers and artists, including Britten, Ronald Blythe, Susan Hill and Maggi Hambling – all drawn to the stark coastline, eerie mudflats and open skies. In A Time and a Place, Frances Gibb engages afresh with Crabbe’s writing – tracing, for the first time, the resonance of this place in his life and work. She delves into his creative struggles, religious faith, romantic loves and opium addiction. Above all, she explores the continual lure – for Crabbe and those who have followed – of the ‘little venal borough’, and the land and sea beyond.
This project has several distinctive features. The first is statistical analysis of publishing records for all British novels (Minerva and otherwise) published between 1780 and 1829 (data are compiled from James Raven’s and Peter Garside’s The English Novel, 1770-1829: a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles). This analysis confirms that Minerva novelists are more prolific than most female novelists in the period. It is rarely noted that Minerva novelists also often publish on occasion with other presses, something to which the data calls attention. The book’s scope and content challenges an anachronism that still permeates studies of the Romantic era. Minerva’s Gothics restores a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet.
The French Revolution sparked an ideological debate which also brought Britain to the brink of revolution in the 1790s. Just as radicals wrote 'Jacobin' fiction, so the fear of rebellion prompted conservatives to respond with novels of their own; indeed, these soon outnumbered the Jacobin novels. This was the first survey of the full range of conservative novels produced in Britain during the 1790s and early 1800s. M. O. Grenby examines the strategies used by conservatives in their fiction, thus shedding new light on how the anti-Jacobin campaign was understood and organised in Britain. Chapters cover the representation of revolution and rebellion, the attack on the 'new philosophy' of radicals such as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and the way in which hierarchy is defended in these novels. Grenby's book offers an insight into the society which produced and consumed anti-Jacobin novels, and presents a case for reexamining these neglected texts.
Acting Like a Lady examines the impact of the eighteenth-century theatre on the ways British women novelists represented female subjectivity. The theatre, Nachumi demonstrates, offered women alternatives to contemporary models of feminine nature that insisted on a direct correlation between a lady's appearance and her quality of mind. It provided theatrical images and tropes which helped women writers dramatize the performative nature of female experience. Grounded in theatre history, Acting Like a Lady draws on current theoretical work concerning gender and representation on the stage and in novels. It considers its primary subjects (Burney, Inchbald, Austen) in depth, and places them in relation to each other and to other novelists, performers, and playwrights. In each case, the novelist's use of theatrical images and practices is linked to her own theatrical experience and to debates relevant to the eighteenth-century stage.
The history of the phrase "pride and prejudice" before it became the title of Jane Austen's most famous novel is largely forgotten today. In particular, most of the reading public is unaware that "pride and prejudice" was a traditional critique adopted by British and American antislavery writers. After Austen's lifetime, the antislavery associations intensified, especially in America. This is the only book about the tradition and the many newly discovered uses of "pride and prejudice" before and after Austen's popular novel. Hundreds of examples in an annotated list show the phrase used to uphold independence--independent judgment, independent ethical behavior, independence that repudiated all forms of oppression. The book demonstrates how, in a natural evolution, the phrase was used to criticize enslavement and the slave trade. Eighteenth-century revolutionary Thomas Paine used it in Common Sense, and nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass used it throughout his lifetime. Choosing her title for these resonances, Austen supported independent reason, reinforced writing by women, and opposed enslavement.
None
The 18th century in Britain was a transition period for literature. Patronage, either by a benefactor or through subscription, lingered even as the publishing and bookselling industries developed. The practice of reviewing books became well established during the second half of the century, with the first periodical founded in 1749. For the literary scholar, these gradual changes mean that different search strategies are required to conduct research into primary and secondary source material across the era. Literary Research and the British Eighteenth Century addresses these unique challenges. It examines how the following all contribute to the richness of literary research for this era: boo...
George Crabbe: A Reappraisal is centered on the belief that Crabbe, particularly in his verse-tales, is an important, even major, poet whose work has been and still is seriously undervalued. After an introductory chapter, the next five chapters in Part 1 offer a straightforward account of the changes in Crabbe's poetry up to its pinnacle of achievement in 1812, tracing its development from the generalized discursive poetical essays of the 1780s through the particularized character sketches and anecdotes of The Parish Register and much of The Borough to the full-length verse-tales that reach their full maturity in Tales (1812).
In 1788, the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living forecast a form of authorship that rested on biographical revelation and media saturation as well as literary achievement. This collection traces the unique experiences of women writers within a celebrity culture that was intimately connected to the expansion of print technology and of visual and material culture in the nineteenth century. The contributors examine a wide range of artifacts, including prefaces, portraits, frontispieces, birthday books, calendars and gossip columns, to consider the nature of women's celebrity and the forces that created it. How did authors like Jane Austen, the Countess of B...