You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Jonathan Brody Kramnick's book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and national identity to capitalism and the print market. Looking at a wide variety of eighteenth-century critical writing, he analyses the tensions that inhabited the categories of national literature and public culture at the moment of their emergence.
This book discusses the nature of masculinity in eighteenth-century literature and culture through the figure of the military man.
Brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis to read 18th-century British philosophy in its historical context. This work analyses how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed their writing; and, how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness.
It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary Canon Trevor Ross challenges this assumption, arguing that canon-formation was going on well before the eighteenth century but was based on a very different set of literary and cultural values. Covering a period that extends from the Middle Ages to the institutionalisation of literature in the eighteenth century, Ross's comprehensive history traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward literature...
The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful—and for that reason, contested—ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meanin...
Essays on eighteenth-century literature from MLQ.
From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl
"Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common--and perhaps the most wounding--is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history."--Publisher's Web site.
Long before Wordsworth etherealized him as 'the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride', Thomas Chatterton was touted as the 'second Shakespeare' by eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked among the leading British poets by prominent literary critics, and likened to the fashionable modern prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett. His pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, in particular, engendered a renewed fascination with ancient English literature. With Chatterton as its case study, this book offers new insights into the formation and development of literary scholarship in the period, from the periodical press to the public lecture, from the review to the anthology, from textual to biographical criticism. Cook demonstrates that, while major scholars found Chatterton to be a pertinent subject for multiple literary debates in the eighteenth century, by the end of the Romantic period he had become, and still remains, an unsettling model of hubristic genius.
In Gender, Theatre and the Origins of Criticism, Marcie Frank explores the theoretical and literary legacy of John Dryden to a number of prominent women writers of the time. Frank examines the pre-eminence of gender, sexuality and the theatre in Dryden's critical texts that are predominantly rewritings of the work of his own literary precursors - Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Milton. She proposes that Dryden develops a native literary tradition that is passed on as an inheritance to his heirs - Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley - as well as their male contemporaries. Frank describes the development of criticism in the transition from a court-sponsored theatrical culture to one oriented toward a consuming public, with very different attitudes to gender and sexuality. This study also sets out to trace the historical origins of certain aspects of current criticism - the practices of paraphrase, critical self-consciousness and performativity.