An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: John Skinner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230629466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The formal and expressive range of canonic eighteenth-century fiction is enourmous: between them Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne seem to have anticipated just about every question confronting the modern novelist; and Aphra Behn even raises a number of issues overlooked by her male successors. But one might also reverse the coin: much of what is present in these writers will today seem remote and bizarre. There is, in fact, only one novelist from the 'long' eighteenth century who is not an endangered species outside the protectorates of university English departments: Jane Austen. Plenty of people read her, moreover, without the need for secondary literature. These reservations were taken into account in the writing of this book. An Introduction to Eighteenth Century Fiction is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to English fiction from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. It deals with novel criticism, canon formation and relations between genre and gender. The second part of the book contains an extensive discussion of Richardson and Fielding, followed by paired readings of major eighteenth-century novels, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney among others. The various sections of the book, and even the individual chapters, may be read independently or in any order. Works are discussed in a way intended to help students who have not read them, and even engage with some who never will. The author consumes eighteenth-century fiction avidly, but has tried to write a reader-friendly survey for those who may not.

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: John Skinner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230629466
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The formal and expressive range of canonic eighteenth-century fiction is enourmous: between them Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne seem to have anticipated just about every question confronting the modern novelist; and Aphra Behn even raises a number of issues overlooked by her male successors. But one might also reverse the coin: much of what is present in these writers will today seem remote and bizarre. There is, in fact, only one novelist from the 'long' eighteenth century who is not an endangered species outside the protectorates of university English departments: Jane Austen. Plenty of people read her, moreover, without the need for secondary literature. These reservations were taken into account in the writing of this book. An Introduction to Eighteenth Century Fiction is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to English fiction from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. It deals with novel criticism, canon formation and relations between genre and gender. The second part of the book contains an extensive discussion of Richardson and Fielding, followed by paired readings of major eighteenth-century novels, juxtaposing texts by Behn and Defoe, Sterne and Smollett, Lennox and Burney among others. The various sections of the book, and even the individual chapters, may be read independently or in any order. Works are discussed in a way intended to help students who have not read them, and even engage with some who never will. The author consumes eighteenth-century fiction avidly, but has tried to write a reader-friendly survey for those who may not.

The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: April London
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895359
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
A clearly written account of the development of the novel over the course of the long eighteenth century.

The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Poetry PDF Author: John Sitter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139502468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700–1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed analyses of individual works by poets from Finch, Swift and Pope, to Gray, Cowper and Barbauld. An approachable introduction to English poetry and major poets of the eighteenth century, this book provides a grounding in poetic analysis useful to students and general readers of literature.

Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues

Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues PDF Author: Stuart Sim
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748631313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially?The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the 'long' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property

Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property PDF Author: Wolfram Schmidgen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139434829
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, Wolfram Schmidgen draws on legal and economic writings to analyse the description of houses, landscapes, and commodities in eighteenth-century fiction. His study argues that such descriptions are important to the British imagination of community. By making visible what it means to own something, they illuminate how competing concepts of property define the boundaries of the individual, of social community, and of political systems. In this way, Schmidgen recovers description as a major feature of eighteenth-century prose, and he makes his case across a wide range of authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Ann Radcliffe. The book's most incisive theoretical contribution lies in its careful insistence on the unity of the human and the material: in Schmidgen's argument, persons and things are inescapably entangled. This approach produces fresh insights into the relationship between law, literature, and economics.

Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature PDF Author: A. Wetmore
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137346345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?

Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen

Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen PDF Author: Robert Mayer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521529105
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen offers an extensive introduction to cinematic representations of the eighteenth century, mostly derived from classic fiction of that period, and sheds light on the process of making prose fiction into film. The contributors provide a variety of theoretical and critical approaches to the process of bringing literary works to the screen. They consider a broad range of film and television adaptations, including several versions of Robinson Crusoe; three films of Moll Flanders; American, British, and French television adaptations of Gulliver's Travels, Clarissa, Tom Jones, and Jacques le fataliste; Wim Wender's film version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice Years; the controversial film of Diderot's La Religieuese; and French and Anglo-American motion pictures based on Les Liaisons dangereuses among others. This book will appeal to students and scholars of literature and film alike.

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: John Richetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139825046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In the past twenty years our understanding of the novel's emergence in eighteenth-century Britain has drastically changed. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. In various ways each seeks to show that the novel is not defined primarily by its realism of representation, but by the new ideological and cultural functions it serves in the emerging modern world of print culture. Sentimental and Gothic fiction and fiction by women are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and Burney. This multifaceted picture of the novel in its formative decades provides a comprehensive and indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century British novel, and its place within the culture of its time.

The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: April London
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107377595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century, the novel became established as a popular literary form all over Europe. Britain proved an especially fertile ground, with Defoe, Fielding, Richardson and Burney as early exponents of the novel form. The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel considers the development of the genre in its formative period in Britain. Rather than present its history as a linear progression, April London gives an original new structure to the field, organizing it through three broad thematic clusters – identity, community and history. Within each of these themes, she explores the central tensions of eighteenth-century fiction: between secrecy and communicativeness, independence and compliance, solitude and family, cosmopolitanism and nation-building. The reader will gain a thorough understanding of both prominent and lesser-known novels and novelists, key social and literary contexts, the tremendous formal variety of the early novel and its growth from a marginal to a culturally central genre.

Novel Bodies

Novel Bodies PDF Author: Jason S. Farr
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684481090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.