The Economy of Character

The Economy of Character PDF Author: Deidre Lynch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226498204
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
At the start of the 18th century, literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. However, this text shows how, by the 19th century, readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly-commercialized social relations.

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.

A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century

A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Samuel Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description


Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-century Literature

Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-century Literature PDF Author: Liisa Steinby
Publisher: Crossing Boundaries: Turku Medieval and Early Modern Studies
ISBN: 9789089648747
Category : European fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
This collection of essays studies the encounter between allegedly ahistorical concepts of narratology and eighteenth-century literature. It questions whether the general concepts of narratology are as such applicable to historically specific fields, or whether they need further specification. Furthermore, at issue is the question whether the theoretical concepts actually are, despite their appearance of ahistorical generality, derived from the historical study of a particular period and type of literature. In the essays such concepts as genre, plot, character, event, tellability, perspective, temporality, description, reading, metadiegetic narration, and paratext are scrutinized in the context of eighteenth-century texts. The writers include some of the leading theorists of both narratology and eighteenth-century literature.

Character's Theater

Character's Theater PDF Author: Lisa A. Freeman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812236394
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
If the whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In Character's Theater, Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's "theater of the mind," Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," and Diderot's "tableaux" are all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the subject's stability is to be maintained. Finding that much of this discussion about the "Age of the Spectator" has been conducted without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice, Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre over the course of a series of discontinuous acts. In a genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Peter Sabor
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754662952
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This fascinating volume brings together Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars who examine how Shakespeare gradually penetrated, and came to dominate, the culture and intellectual life of people in the English-speaking world. Approaching Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy, science, textual practice, and theatre studies, the contributors paint a vivid picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century Shakespeare and ideas about shared nationhood, knowledge, morality, history, and the self.

The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama – Second Edition

The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama – Second Edition PDF Author: Diana Solomon
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1037700015
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 952

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Book Description
This exciting second edition provides an exceptional range of plays edited by leading scholars of Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre. In addition to fifteen plays from the first edition are four new plays and one new afterpiece: Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens, John Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife, David Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Such Things Are. Every play now features an engaging headnote and a fully edited dramatis personae, prologue, and epilogue. The innovative introduction plunges its readers into the experience of playgoing in London, and the edition features supplementary texts, including select actor and actress biographies and theatrical documents that provide a vivid cultural context.

Scepticism Society And The Eighteenth-Century Novel

Scepticism Society And The Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Eve Tavor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349185167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description


Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson

Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson PDF Author: Bonnie Latimer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Proposing that Samuel Richardson's novels were crucial for the construction of female individuality in the mid-eighteenth century, Bonnie Latimer shows that Richardson's heroines are uniquely conceived as individuals who embody the agency and self-determination implied by that term. In addition to placing Richardson within the context of his own culture, recouping for contemporary readers the influence of Grandison on later writers, including Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Scott, and Mary Wollstonecraft, is central to her study. Latimer argues that Grandison has been unfairly marginalised in favor of Clarissa and Pamela, and suggests that a rigorous rereading of the novel not only provides a basis for reassessing significant aspects of Richardson's fictional oeuvre, but also has implications for fresh thinking about the eighteenth-century novel. Latimer's study is not a specialist study of Grandison but rather a reconsideration of Richardson's novelistic canon that places Grandison at its centre as Richardson's final word on his re-envisioning of the gendered self.

Re-Viewing Thomas Holcroft, 1745-1809

Re-Viewing Thomas Holcroft, 1745-1809 PDF Author: A.A. Markley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131706366X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Thomas Holcroft was a central figure of the 1790s, whose texts played an important role in the transition toward Romanticism. In this, the first essay collection devoted to his life and work, the contributors reassess Holcroft's contributions to a remarkable range of literary genres-drama, poetry, fiction, autobiography, political philosophy-and to the project of revolutionary reform in the late eighteenth century. The self-educated son of a cobbler, Holcroft transformed himself into a popular playwright, influential reformist novelist, and controversial political radical. But his work is not important merely because he himself was a remarkable character, but rather because he was a hinge figure between laboring Britons and the dissenting intelligentsia, between Enlightenment traditions and developing 'Romantic' concerns, and between the world of self-made hack writers and that of established critics. Enhanced by an updated and corrected chronology of Holcroft's life and work, key images, and a full bibliography of published scholarship, this volume makes way for more concerted and focused scholarship and teaching on Holcroft. Taken together, the essays in this collection situate Holcroft's self-fashioning as a member of London's literati, his central role among the London radical reformers and intelligentsia, and his theatrical innovations within ongoing explorations of the late eighteenth-century public sphere of letters and debate.