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This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche’s Apologie and her friend Lady Vane’s Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholars interested in life writing, women’s history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.
After its publication in early 1791, A Simple Story was widely read in England and abroad, going into a second edition in March of the same year. The novel’s young heroine, Miss Milner, scandalously declares herself in love with her guardian, Dorriforth, a Catholic priest. Dorriforth returns her love and is released from his vows. Though the pair go on to marry, the second half of the novel reveals the disastrous and far-reaching consequences of Miss Milner’s subsequent adulterous affair. The critical introduction to this Broadview edition considers such issues as Catholicism, theatricality, the theatre, and the masquerade, while the appendices provide a wide selection of cultural, biographical, and literary contexts for the novel.
In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.
Proposing that Samuel Richardson's novels were crucial for the construction of female individuality in the mid-eighteenth century, Bonnie Latimer shows that Richardson's heroines are uniquely conceived as individuals who embody the agency and self-determination implied by that term. In addition to placing Richardson within the context of his own culture, recouping for contemporary readers the influence of Grandison on later writers, including Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Scott, and Mary Wollstonecraft, is central to her study. Latimer argues that Grandison has been unfairly marginalised in favor of Clarissa and Pamela, and suggests that a rigorous rereading of the novel not only provides a basis for reassessing significant aspects of Richardson's fictional oeuvre, but also has implications for fresh thinking about the eighteenth-century novel. Latimer's study is not a specialist study of Grandison but rather a reconsideration of Richardson's novelistic canon that places Grandison at its centre as Richardson's final word on his re-envisioning of the gendered self.
These memoirs all come from women forced to live lives of impropriety, often after ill-treatment from unscrupulous men. Their tales of survival in the face of extreme hardship and privations make inspirational and compelling reading.
Walsingham is both a lively story and a commentary by Mary Robinson on her society’s constraints upon women. The novel follows the lives of two main characters, Walsingham Ainsforth and his cousin, Sir Sidney Aubrey, a girl who is passed off as a son by her mother so that she will become the family heir. Sidney, educated in France, returns to England as an adult and persistently sabotages Walsingham’s love interests (having secretly fallen in love with him herself). Eventually, Sidney reveals her identity, and she and Walsingham declare their mutual love, wed, and share the family’s estate. This Broadview edition includes a rich selection of primary sources material including contemporary reviews; historical and literary accounts of eighteenth-century female cross-dressers; and selections from contemporary works that focus on the figure of the "fallen" woman.
A Genealogy of the Gentleman argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their narrative constructions of the gentleman. It challenges two latent critical assumptions: first, that the gentleman’s masculinity is normative, private, and therefore oppositional to concepts of performance; and second, that women writers, from their disadvantaged position within a patriarchal society, had no real means of influencing dominant structures of masculinity. By placing writers such as Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Robinson in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentlema...
Twentieth-century mass produced pulp crime usually ends with the protagonists unable to rid themselves of the presence of forces that inhibit professional or emotional growth. Stoic perseverance is often their acknowledgement of the power of fate. The diverse, still-emerging genre of Country (or Redneck, Ridgerunner, or Ozark) noir is marked by protagonists who have an instinct for community as a coherent territory and recreate the possibly self-destructive but stubbornly self-assertive traits that characterized what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.” Rural fiction’s protagonists struggle to replace a set of convictions which no longer sustain community or family. Often enough, their struggles produce a generational survival of perseverance, family and clan mutuality, the need for passing tough tests, and spirituality. They often wind up “far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow” (Dylan’s “Tambourine Man”).
In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days. All that had been familiar, settled, known, was suddenly and entirely swept away. Londoners faced an emptiness that was not only physical but also historical, social, financial and conceptual. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London is the first study to situate the literature of Restoration and early Augustan England within the historical and cultural contexts of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Cynthia Wall relates the marked topographical specificity of plays, poems and novels to a wider cultural network of responses to changing perceptions of urban space, and she shows how the literatures of the period - along with the surveying, mapping, rebuilding and official redescribing of the city - attempt to reinvest the city with comprehensible meaning and create new spaces for new genres.
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Work...