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Why have so many cultures created what we call imaginative literature in the past, and still do? What prompts so many people to read literature? And how are we to understand the economy that links these producers and consumers? These and related questions plagued the author for a couple of decades before he began to set down the results of his research into the roles and functions that creative writing has had in various societies. More and more, the evidence seemed to point towards our feelings about the effects of time on our lives, and our memories of special places that enchanted or changed us. He illustrates his findings by examining a wide range of literary artifacts.
What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.
This is a story of two young men, fresh from school, as they travel in search of knowledge about the world and themselves. Trying to reach Africa on motor scooters, they nearly circle the Mediterranean. The impulses and questions they have are archetypal: similar tales can be told by and of many others who have undertaken their own quests at the turning point between formal education and the decisions that will shape the rest of their lives....
Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.
The position Frances Burney (1752-1840) holds as a novelist, journalist, and letterwriter is now undisputed, thanks to reevaluations of the canon in recent years. Yet Burney was always intrigued by, and wrote for, the stage. Though only one of Burney's dramas was performed in her lifetime, Barbara Darby places the plays in the context of performance and feminist theory, challenging past assertions about Burney that were based entirely on her novels and journals. Darby maintains that in exposing the failure of such practices and institutions as courtship, marriage, family, government, and the church, Burney's dramas often exceed her novels in the depth of their social commentary. In her four ...
Caribbean Literature in English places its subject in its precise regional context. The `Caribbean', generally considered as one area, is highly discrete in its topography, race and languages, including mainland Guyana, the Atlantic island of Barbados, the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, and Jamaica, whose size and history gave it an early sense of separate nationhood. Beginning with Raleigh's Discoverie of...Guiana (1596), this innovative study traces the sometimes surprising evolution of cultures which shared a common experience of slavery, but were intimately related to individual local areas. The approach is interdisciplinary, examining the heritage of the plantation era, and the issues of la...
This book presents two unpublished plays by John Thelwall (1764-1834), a friend of Coleridge, a radical lecturer for the London Corresponding Society acquitted of treason in 1794, and a prolific man of letters who produced novels, poetry, journalism, literary criticism, scientific and political essays, autobiography, and sociological analysis, in addition to drama. Both plays, libretti for the London theater, are especially relevant today as they use popular literary forms to discuss critically issues of race, empire, revolution, and sexuality. Incle and Yarico (1792) comically treats the important eighteenth-century intertextual fable of the English merchant, Inkle, who betrays the Indian m...
This is the only collection of its kind to focus on one of the most important aspects of the cultural history of the Romantic period, its sources, and its afterlives. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume examines the variety of areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in which the sublime played a substantial role during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With impressive international scope, this Companion considers the Romantic sublime in both European and American contexts and features essays by leading scholars from a range of national backgrounds and subject specialisms, including state-of-the-art perspectives in digital and environmental humanities. An accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction, aimed at researchers, students, and general readers alike, and including extensive suggestions for further reading, The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime is the go-to book on the subject.
This book surveys Irish writing in English over the last two centuries, from Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney, to give the literary student and the general reader an up-to-date sense of its variety and vitality and to indicate some of the ways in which it has been described and discussed. It begins with a brief outline of Irish history, of Irish writing in Irish and Latin, and of writing in English before 1800. Later chapters consider Irish romanticism, Victorian Ireland, W.B.Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, new directions in Irish writing after Joyce and the literature of contemporary Ireland, north and south, from 1960 to the present.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.