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This book traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830s.
In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At...
Uncovers the life of Jane Cumming, who scandalized her contemporaries with tales of sexual deviancy but also defied cultural norms, standing up to male authority figures and showing resilience.
A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present. Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her de...
This study re-examines the genre of Romantic travel writing through the perspective of women writers.
Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the 19th century. This work takes a look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long 18th century. It asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men -one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history.
The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth Century Novel is the first published book to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. It is an indispensible resource for those with an interest in the history of the novel.
'Pamela under the Notion of being a Virtuous Modest Girl will be introduced into all Familes,and when she gets there, what Scenes does she represent? Why a fine young Gentleman endeavouring to debauch a beautiful young Girl of Sixteen.' (Pamela Censured, 1741) One of the most spectacular successes of the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteeent-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world 'into two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists', even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached up for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividl...
Alexander Pettit analyzes the formation of and the reaction against the notion of a unified opposition to England's de facto prime minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), the "great man" of Scriblerian satire who was reviled throughout the 1730s for his hostility to the belles lettres, his alleged disregard of the royal prerogative, and his concentration of power in an oligarchy of parliamentary "placemen." The discussion draws extensively on ephemeral plays, sermons, pamphlets, and newspapers that in their own day were regarded as significant contributions to the political debate. Pettit shows that the myth of coherent anti-Walpoleanism was promoted vigorously by Henry St. John, Viscount B...