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Pulitzer Prize Finalist: A biography of the wildly colorful eighteenth-century British politician who became “the toast of American revolutionaries” (Booklist). One of the most colorful figures in English political history, John Wilkes (1726–97) is remembered as the father of the British free press, a defender of civil and political liberties—and a hero to American colonists. Wilkes’s political career was rancorous, involving duels, imprisonments in the Tower of London, and the Massacre of St. George’s Fields, in which seven of his supporters were shot to death by government troops. He was equally famous for his “private” life—as a confessed libertine, a member of the notor...
When Mr. and Mrs. Shandy stroll out to watch Toby and Trim march in formation to the Widow Wadman's house, they use a familiar occurrence to gauge the day of the week. The sight of Mr. Yorick's congregation emerging from the parish church tells them it is a Sunday; Mrs. Shandy provides the more specific information that it is Sacrament Sunday, which tells Mr. Shandy that it is the first Sunday of the month. Modern readers may slip over this brief exchange, but it is the gateway to a series of inquiries whose answers the original readers of Tristram Shandy would have taken for granted. Drawing on modern historical research and eighteenth-century texts, Yorick's Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne answers these inquiries.
English historians in the Middle Ages is an overview of the history of English historians and their works in the Middle Ages. English historians helped lay the groundwork for modern historical methodology, provided vital accounts of the early history of England, its culture, and revelations about the historians themselves.The most remarkable period of historical writting was during the High Middle Ages in the 12th and 13th centuries, when English chronicles produced works with a variety of interest, wealth of information and amplitude of range. However one might choose to view the reliability.
'Love is nothing without feeling. And feeling is still less without love.' Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of 'a school of sentimental writers', A Sentimental Journey (1768) has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick's travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary travel writers whom Sterne satirizes in the figures of Smelfungus and Mundungus. A master of ambiguity and double entendre, Sterne is nevertheless as concerned as his peers with exploring the nature of virtue; unlike other writers of sentimental fiction Sterne insi...
John Wilkes remains one of the most colourful and intriguing characters of eighteenth-century Britain. Born in 1725, the son of a prosperous London distiller, he was given the classical education of a gentleman, before entering politics as a Whig. Finding his party in opposition following the accession of George III in 1760 he took up his pen with sensational effect, and made a career out of excoriating the new administration and promoting the Whig interest. His charismatic style and vicious wit soon ensured that he became a figurehead for the radical cause, earning him many admirers and many enemies. Amongst the latter were the king, and the artist William Hogarth who famously depicted Wilk...
In annotated texts based on those of the acclaimed Florida Edition of The Works of Laurence Sterne, this edition features the two works Sterne produced in the final year of his illness-plagued life: the witty, bawdy, pathetic, and thoughtful A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy; and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal, Sterne's correspondence to a twenty-two-year-old married Englishwoman living in India ("a Diary," as he put it, "of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose Society he languish'd"). Together, these mutually illuminating works offer rich insight into their author's hopes, fears, loves, longings, and philosophy as he prepared to face death and judgment. Excerpts from related texts provide context for understanding the title works in relation to the earlier writings and life of this exuberant yet subtle genius of eighteenth-century English literature.
Every ending marks a potential beginning; every act of reading is, in a very real sense an act of re-writing; and to revise is, literally, to re-see. These bits of conventional wisdom underlie the topic explored in this volume's collection of essays by literary critics who want to know more about the instinct to continue and the impulse to revise an existing text.
The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the burgeoning eighteenth-century fascination with the human body as an eloquent, expressive object. This wide-ranging study examines the role of the body within a number of cultural arenas - particularly oratory, the theatre and the novel - and charts the efforts of projectors and reformers who sought to exploit the textual potential of the body for the public assertion of modern politeness. Paul Goring shows how diverse writers and performers including David Garrick, James Fordyce, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne were involved in the construction of new ideals of physical eloquence - bourgeois, sentimental ideals which stood in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Through innovative readings of fiction and contemporary manuals on acting and public speaking, Goring reveals the ways in which the human body was treated as an instrument for the display of sensibility and polite values.