Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: Eric Rothstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520328132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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 1975.

Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: Eric Rothstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520328132
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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 1975.

Character & Consciousness in Eighteenth-century Comic Fiction

Character & Consciousness in Eighteenth-century Comic Fiction PDF Author: Elizabeth Kraft
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820313658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The eighteenth-century novel developed amid an emerging emphasis on individualism that clashed with long-cherished beliefs in hierarchy and stability. Though the comic novelists, unlike Defoe and Richardson, avoided total involvement in the mind of any one character, they were nonetheless fundamentally concerned with the nature of consciousness. In Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, Elizabeth Kraft examines the kind of consciousness central to comic novels of the period. It is, she asserts, individual identity conceived in social terms--a character's search for his or her place in a precarious secular order. Understanding this concept of character is vitally important to a full appreciation of eighteenth-century comic fiction. To respond validly to these fictional characters, Kraft claims, the twentieth-century reader must recapture, or recreate, the eighteenth-century self. In readings of five novels--Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, and Fanny Burney's Cecilia--Kraft explores the relationships among consciousness, character, and comic narrative. Fielding, Lennox, and Sterne, she argues, question the validity of narratives of consciousness. Each seeks to define the limitations as well as the virtues of the form in representing the individual and communal lives. Smollett and Burney, on the other hand, address a readership that expects the novel to offer meaningful renderings of person experience. These novelists accept the validity of the narrative of consciousness but place this narrative within the context of the larger community. As a thorough analysis of relations between narrative and the construction of character and consciousness, Kraft's study is an important addition to our understanding of the theoretical formulations of eighteenth-century fiction.

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.

Systems Failure

Systems Failure PDF Author: Andrew Franta
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421427516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
How eighteenth-century writers stretched systems designed to explain social relations to their breaking point, showing the flaws in their design. The Enlightenment has long been understood—and often understood itself—as an age of systems. In 1759, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, one of the architects of the Encyclopédie, claimed that "the true system of the world has been recognized, developed, and perfected." In Systems Failure, Andrew Franta challenges this view by exploring the fascination with failure and obsession with unpredictable social forces in a range of English authors from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen. Franta argues that attempts to extend the Enlightenment's systematic spirit to the social world prompted many prominent authors to reject the idea that knowledge is synonymous with system. In readings of texts ranging from novels by Sterne, Smollett, Godwin, and Austen to Johnson's literary biographies and De Quincey's periodical essays, Franta shows how writers repeatedly take up civil and cultural institutions designed to rationalize society only to reveal the weaknesses that inevitably undermine their organizational and explanatory power. Diverging from influential accounts of the rise of the novel, Systems Failure audaciously reveals that, in addition to representing individual experience and social reality, the novel was also a vehicle for thinking about how the social world resists attempts to explain or comprehend it. Franta contends that to appreciate the power of systems in the literature of the long eighteenth century, we must pay attention to how often they fail—and how many of them are created for the express purpose of failing. In this unraveling, literature arrives at its most penetrating insights about the structure of social life.

The English Novel in History 1700-1780

The English Novel in History 1700-1780 PDF Author: John Richetti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134656424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The English Novel in History 1700-1780 provides students with specific contexts for the early novel in response to a new understanding of eigtheenth-century Britain. It traces the social and moral representations of the period in extended readings of the major novelists, as well as evaluatiing the importance of lesser known ones. John Richetti traces the shifting subject matter of the novel, discussing: * scandalous and amatory fictions * criminal narratives of the early part of the century * the more disciplined, realistic, and didactic strain that appears in the 1740's and 1750's * novels promoting new ideas about the nature of domestic life * novels by women and how they relate to the shift of subject matter This original and useful book revises traditional literary history by considering novels from those years in the context of the transformation of Britain in the eighteenth century.

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Hal Gladfelder
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080187565X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Stories of transgression–Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve—may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterizes the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding. Beginning with the various genres of crime narrative, Gladfelder maps a complex network of discourses that collectively embodied the range of responses to the transgressive at the turn of the eighteenth century. In the book's second and third parts, he demonstrates how the discourses of criminality became enmeshed with emerging novelistic conceptions of character and narrative form. With special attention to Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Gladfelder argues that Defoe's narratives concentrate on the forces that shape identity, especially under conditions of outlawry, social dislocation, and urban poverty. He next considers Fielding's double career as author and magistrate, analyzing the interaction between his fiction and such texts as the aggressively polemical Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and his eyewitness accounts of the sensational Canning and Penlez cases. Finally, Gladfelder turns to Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, and Inchbald's Nature and Art to reveal the degree to which criminal narrative, by the end of the eighteenth century, had become a necessary vehicle for articulating fundamental cultural anxieties and longings. Crime narratives, he argues, vividly embody the struggles of individuals to define their place in the suddenly unfamiliar world of modernity.

Print, Chaos, and Complexity

Print, Chaos, and Complexity PDF Author: Mark E. Wildermuth
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874130324
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This text describes how 18th-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically.

Psychosocial Spaces

Psychosocial Spaces PDF Author: Steven J. Gores
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814326633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
"He next examines Sophia Lee's novel The Recess, along with prints and sketches of ruins, to place the monastic ruin at the focus of desire to repress discontinuity in the past, which in turn permitted individuals to conceive of constructing identity based on genealogy. Then, through a study of Henry Fielding's Amelia, he discusses portrait miniatures and silhouettes as fetishized symbols of erotic ties, showing how images of a beloved, with their promises for the future, were used as a basis for constructing individual identity."--Jacket.

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates

Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates PDF Author: Erin Mackie
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801890888
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding

Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding PDF Author: Jennifer Preston Wilson
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 160329225X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The works of Henry Fielding, though written nearly three hundred years ago, retain their sense of comedy and innovation in the face of tradition, and they easily engage the twenty-first-century student with many aspects of eighteenth-century life: travel, inns, masquerades, political and religious factions, the '45, prisons and the legal system, gender ideals and realities, social class. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," discusses the available editions of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia; suggests useful critical and contextual works for teaching them; and recommends helpful audiovisual and electronic resources. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," demonstrate that many of the methods and models used for one novel-- the romance tradition, Fielding's legal and journalistic writing, his techniques as a playwright, the ideas of Machiavelli-- can be adapted to others.