Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book PDF Author: Helen Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108912834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings of his work based on meticulous examination of its material and bibliographical conditions. Alongside multiple editions and manuscripts of Sterne's own letters and works, a panorama of interdisciplinary sources are explored, including dance manuals, letter-writing handbooks, newspaper advertisements, medical pamphlets and disposable packaging. For the first time, this wealth of previously overlooked material is critically analysed in relation to the design history of Tristram Shandy, conceptualising the eighteenth-century novel as an artefact that developed in close conjunction with other media. In examining the complex interrelation between a period's literature and the print matter of everyday life, this study sheds new light on Sterne and eighteenth-century literature by re-defining the origins of his work and of the eighteenth-century novel more broadly, whilst introducing readers to diverse print cultural forms and their production histories.

Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book PDF Author: Helen Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108912834
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings of his work based on meticulous examination of its material and bibliographical conditions. Alongside multiple editions and manuscripts of Sterne's own letters and works, a panorama of interdisciplinary sources are explored, including dance manuals, letter-writing handbooks, newspaper advertisements, medical pamphlets and disposable packaging. For the first time, this wealth of previously overlooked material is critically analysed in relation to the design history of Tristram Shandy, conceptualising the eighteenth-century novel as an artefact that developed in close conjunction with other media. In examining the complex interrelation between a period's literature and the print matter of everyday life, this study sheds new light on Sterne and eighteenth-century literature by re-defining the origins of his work and of the eighteenth-century novel more broadly, whilst introducing readers to diverse print cultural forms and their production histories.

Labyrinth of Digressions

Labyrinth of Digressions PDF Author: René Bosch
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042022914
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
With their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers' hype. Small publishers and anonymous imitators seized on Sterne's success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne's intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the background of Augustan and Grub-street satire. The earliest imitators harked back to traditions of banter and folklore, bawdy and grotesque humour, pathetic stories and orthodox religiosity, reaffirming a pattern of moral and aesthetic values that was conservative for its time. Philosophical Sentimentalism appears to have been a late development. It is also argued that, partly because of their bad reputation, some of the authors of forgeries and parodies had a greater influence on the original than the reviewers to whom Sterne is often said to have listened. The imitators followed leads and themes in the first instalments, developing them according to their own conception of Sterne's project and the reasons for his success. As a consequence, they unintentially put a pressure on Sterne to alter his course, and even to abandon some of the narrative lines and themes he had set out for himself. The literature section contains a chronological checklist of English eighteenth-century Sterneana.

The Eighteenth-century British Novel and Its Background

The Eighteenth-century British Novel and Its Background PDF Author: Henry George Hahn
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810817869
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Tristram Shandy (Routledge Revivals)

Tristram Shandy (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Max Byrd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317678567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Max Byrd’s lucidly written and compelling volume aims to provide a scholarly introduction to one of the most puzzling pieces of eighteenth-century literature, and a stimulus to critical thought and discussion. Laurence Sterne – an eccentric and largely unsuccessful clergyman - was forty-six when he sat down in January of 1759 to being his literary masterpiece. Aside from his sermons, only two of which had ever been published, Sterne had little more to do with the literary life than any other respectable provincial clergyman. His explosion into the history of English literature occurred not only without preparation, but also without apparent aptitude. Tristram Shandy, first published in 1985, sketches Sterne’s life and literary antecedents, closely analysing key passages of his great satire and concluding with the critical history and bibliography. It will thus be of use to all students of eighteenth-century English literature.

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination

The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination PDF Author: Roman Alexander Barton
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110625318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Encyclopedia of the Novel

Encyclopedia of the Novel PDF Author: Paul Schellinger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135918333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 2557

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Book Description
The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.

The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics

The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics PDF Author: Carol Stewart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317034503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Linking the decline in Church authority in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasing respectability of fiction, Carol Stewart provides a new perspective on the rise of the novel. The resulting readings of novels by authors such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen trace the translation of ethical debate into secular and gendered terms. Stewart argues that the seventeenth-century debate about ethics that divided Latitudinarians and Calvinists found its way into novels of the eighteenth century. Her book explores the growing belief that novels could do the work of moral reform more effectively than the Anglican Church, with attention to related developments, including the promulgation of Anglican ethics in novels as a response to challenges to Anglican practice and authority. An increasingly legitimate genre, she argues, offered a forum both for investigating the situation of women and challenging patriarchal authority, and for challenging the dominant political ideology.

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness PDF Author: Brian Michael Norton
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611484316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel’s participation in eighteenth-century “inquiries after happiness,” an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton’s innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His centralargument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual’s psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one’s power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment’s ethical legacy.

Essays on English and American Literature, and a Sheaf of Poems

Essays on English and American Literature, and a Sheaf of Poems PDF Author: Jan Bakker
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789062035908
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies

Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies PDF Author: Stuart M. Tave
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226790190
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Through dreams and shadows and strangeness, through blinding charms and eye-opening counter-charms, through moments of mortification and laughter—thus Stuart M. Tave traces the journey of the lovers, clowns, and fairies who populate comedies from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Waiting for Godot. Tave avoids the pitfalls of theory, taking instead a close look at particular works to give us a sense of the relations between certain dramas and novels that are called comedies. The result is a wonderfully readable book that renews our delight in the enchanting possibilities of literature. A Midsummer Night's Dream, in its "perfection," is Tave's point of departure. Its characters fall neatly into the three groups of Tave's title and fulfill to perfection their functions of desire, foolishness, and power. From the magical concord of Shakespeare's resolution, Tave moves to works whose character face ever greater difficulties in reaching a happy conclusion. From Jonson and Austen to Chekhov and Beckett, he meets comedies on their own terms, illuminating the complex and individual genius of each. A masterpiece of practical criticism, Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies rediscovers the pleasure of reading comedies.