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A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.
The fifteen essays in this volume, written by friends, colleagues, and former students, attempt both to acknowledge and to honor Martin C. Battestin's many contributions to our understanding of the literature and art of the so-called Augustan period.
Tracing their shared vision in such works as Memoirs of Scriblerus, Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera, and The Dunciad, Brückmann identifies the pastoral as their common ideal and analyses their shared hostilities and anxieties regarding the erosion of that ideal in an age they saw as grotesquely degenerate. She points out that in many ways the group was out of step with its own time and much more attuned to ancient and traditional images of felicity and to ancient authors who subscribed to these values. The influence of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, who both figure as icons in the Scriblerians' work, as well as such authors as Seneca, Lucian, Lucius Apuleius, and François Rabelais is explored in detail. Looking forward, Brückmann highlights the Scriblerian influence on writers such as Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Robert Coover, and James Joyce, offering a place for dialogue between modern humanists and their eighteenth-century forebears.
"This is the first scholarly book on de Forest. It explores his career in the decorative arts by examining cultural context, material culture, biography, and patronage. Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932) is best known as an artistic decorator with a flair for designs based on the arts and crafts of the Middle East and India. He began his career in partnership with Louis Comfort Tiffany. By 1883, de Forest had his own business and successfully introduced the East Indian craft revival to the United States. His interior designs and furnishings were embraced by some of the wealthiest families of the Gilded Age. His family home at 7 East Tenth Street in New York City served as a designer showcase and was compared to Arab Hall, a pinnacle of exotic design that was part of Frederic, Lord Leighton's home and studio in Holland Park, London. Complemented by sixty color plates and 132 black-and-white illustrations." --Publisher description.
Understanding the novel as both the document and the agent of social change, Impotent Fathers studies how writers in eighteenth-century Britain at once recorded and helped to define a major demographic crisis suffered by the landed elite from 1650 to 1740. To questions about patriarchy, property, and gender in the early novel, it brings recent work on demographics by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population Studies (E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Schofield, Lloyd Bonfield, and others) and by Lawrence F. and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone. Impotent Fathers proposes that the early novel was an important means for readers and writers to work through anxieties about family, property, and succession created by failures in patrilinear succession.
There is a detailed analysis of Manley's literary relationships with key figures such as Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele, and a full consideration of her political networks, including her working relationship with the Oxford ministry of 1710-1714."--BOOK JACKET.
These thirteen essays offer not only the representations of Swift to which its title refers but also a representation of Swift scholarship at the close of the twentieth century and a return to fundamental questions about the life, writing, and views of Swift, issues raised in part by literary scholarship's return to historicism but also powerfully suggestive of a return to biography.
Scholars and readers who are interested in eighteenth-century British literature are surely familiar with Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi in the light she came to be known in her lifetime and after: first, as the “formidable hostess” of Streatham House, South London, and then as an outcast from respectable eighteenth-century society after she had married the Italian piano teacher of her daughter. As a writer, her importance has long been that of a footnote to Samuel Johnson and as a consequence, she has been part of the official British literary canon only as a character. This volume introduces Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi as a whole, trying to link her fascinating and subversive biography to h...
This book is an extensive investigation of letters and letter writing across two centuries, focusing on the sociocultural function and meaning of epistolary writing - letters that were circulated, were intended to circulate, or were perceived to circulate within the culture of epistolarity in early modern England. The study examines how the letter functioned in a variety of social contexts, yet also assesses what the letter meant as idea to early modern letter writers, investigating letters in both manuscript and print contexts. It begins with an overview of the culture of epistolarity, examines the material components of letter exchange, investigates how emotion was persuasively textualized in the letter, considers the transmission of news and intelligence, and examines the publication of letters as propaganda and as collections of moral-didactic, personal, and state letters. Gary Schneider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Pan American.