Author: Mark Truesdale
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351106678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Get Book Here
Book Description
King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across the late medieval and early modern periods, their cultural influence extending from Robin Hood ballads to Shakespearean national histories. This study represents the first detailed exploration of this rich and fascinating literary tradition, tracing its development across deeply politicized fifteenth-century comic tales and early modern ballads. The medieval King and Commoner tales depict an incognito king becoming lost in the forest and encountering a disgruntled commoner who complains of class oppression and poaches the king’s deer. This is an upside-down world of tricksters, violence, and politicized feasting that critiques and deconstructs medieval hierarchy. The commoners of these tales utilize the inversion of the medieval carnival, crowning themselves as liminal mock kings in the forest while threatening to rend and devour a body politic that would oppress them. These tales are complex and ambiguous, reimagining the socio-political upheaval of the late medieval period in sophisticated ruminations on class relations. By contrast, the early modern ballads and chapbooks see the tradition undergo a conservative metamorphosis. Suppressing its more radical elements amid a celebration of proto-panoptical kings, the tradition remerges as royalist propaganda in which the king watches his thankful subjects through the keyhole.
Author: Lisa M. Maruca
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Work of Print traces a shift in the very definition of literature, from one that encompasses the material conditions of the production and distribution of books to the more familiar emphasis on the solitary author's ownership of an abstract text. Drawing on contemporary accounts of those involved in the trade - printers, booksellers, publishers, and distributors - Lisa Maruca examines attitudes about the creative process and approaches to the commodification of writing. The "work of print" describes the labors through which literature was produced: both the physical labor of making books and the underlying cultural work performed by a set of ideologies about who counted as a maker of texts. Printers' manuals, tracts on typography, legal documents, and booksellers' autobiographies reveal that print workers conceived of their roles as central to the production of literature. Maruca's insightful readings of these documents alongside traditional works of fiction and authors' correspondence show that the claims of print workers and booksellers were part of a struggle for ownership and control as the concept of author as proprietor of his or her intellectual property began to take hold in the mid-1700s, gradually eclipsing print workers' contributions to the process of textual creation. The print trade asserted its authority using a rhetoric of hierarchical and binary sexuality and gender, which affected women working in the industry and limited the type of work they were allowed to perform. In response, women developed strategies to redeploy conventional ideas of gender to gain concessions for themselves as publishers and distributors of printed material, strategies that formed a foundation for the rise of female authorship later in the eighteenth century. Encompassing the histories of literature, labor, technology, publishing, and gender, The Work of Print ultimately offers significant insights into the ideology of authorship and intellectual property and our understanding of textuality and print in the digital age.
Author: Harry M. Solomon
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809316519
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Get Book Here
Book Description
The new biography of the publisher and bookseller who premiered the work of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson deftly integrates Dodsley's life story with the literary transition from court patronage to the age of print that paved the way for the Romantic movement of the 19th century. Solomon (English, Auburn U.) details the unique circumstances that led Dodsley from his position as a weaver's apprentice to his career as a playwright, culminating in his last incarnation as one of the most influential literary forces of his time. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Ian Crowe
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Get Book Here
Book Description
Patriotism and Public Spirit is an innovative study of the formative influences shaping the early writings of the Irish-English statesman Edmund Burke and an early case-study of the relationship between the business of bookselling and the politics of criticism and persuasion. Through a radical reassessment of the impact of Burke's "Irishness" and of his relationship with the London-based publisher Robert Dodsley, the book argues that Burke saw Patriotism as the best way to combine public spirit with the reinforcement of civil order and to combat the use of coded partisan thinking to achieve the dominance of one section of the population over another. No other study has drawn so extensively on the literary and commercial network through which Burke's first writings were published to help explain them. By linking contemporary reinterpretations of the work of Patriot sympathizers and writers such as Alexander Pope and Lord Bolingbroke with generally neglected trends in religious and literary criticism in the Republic of Letters, this book provides new ways of understanding Burke's early publications. The results call into question fundamental assumptions about the course of "Enlightenment" thought and challenge currently dominant post-colonialist and Irish nationalist interpretations of the early Burke.
Author: Susan E. Whyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192518712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Useful Knowledge of William Hutton shows the rapid rise of a self-taught workman and the growing prominence of the city of Birmingham during the two major events of the eighteenth-century - the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Hutton achieved wealth, land, status, and literary fame, but later became a victim of violent riots. The book boldly claims that an understanding of the Industrial Revolution requires engagement with the figure of the 'rough diamond', a person of worth and character, but lacking in manners, education, and refinement. A cast of unpolished entrepreneurs is brought to life as they drive economic and social change, and improve their towns and themselves. The book also contends that the rise of Birmingham cannot be understood without accepting that its vibrant cultural life was a crucial factor that spurred economic growth. Readers are plunged into a hidden provincial world marked by literacy, bookshops, printing, authorship, and the spread of useful knowledge. We see that ordinary people read history and wrote poetry, whilst they grappled with the effects of industrial change. Newly discovered memoirs reveal social conflict and relationships in rare detail. They also address the problems of social mobility, income inequality, and breath-taking technological change that continue to perplex us today.
Author: Chantel M. Lavoie
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838757499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book addresses the place of women writers in anthologies and other literary collections in eighteenth-century England. It explores and contextualizes the ways in which two different kinds of printed material--poetic miscellanies and biographical collections--complemented one another in defining expectations about the woman writer. Far more than the single-authored text, it was the collection in one form or another that invested poems and their authors with authority. By attending to this fascinating cultural context, Chantel Lavoie explores how women poets were placed posthumously in the world of eighteenth-century English letters. Investigating the lives and works of four well known poets--Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Elizabeth Rowe--Lavoie illuminates the way in which celebrated women were collected alongside their poetry, the effect of collocation on individual reputations, and the intersection between bibliography and biography as female poets themselves became curiosities. In so doing, Collecting Women contributes to the understanding of the intersection of cultural history, canon formation, and literary collecting in eighteenth-century England.
Author: Adam Budd
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191019666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Historians of the intellectual and literary culture of the Enlightenment have recognised the importance of Andrew Millar (1705-68). His publisher's imprint adorned the title-pages of the most important works of the eighteenth century, in fiction, poetry, drama, medicine, and philosophy. This is the first extended study of Millar's commercial and social role in the commissioning, production, circulation, and consumption of Enlightenment literature in Britain. Providing a new intervention on the culture of Enlightenment this study shows how and why Millar provoked major controversies through his role as friend, patron, and publisher to great rivals in the republic of letters. An unprecedent analysis of publishing and authorship at the intersection of politics, business, visual arts, moral debate, and literary self-fashioning, this study of Andrew Millar also shows the degree to which Scottish identity shaped a professional career within London's rise as the cosmopolitan centre of learning and trade at the heart of the British empire. This volume presents hundreds of previously unpublished letters that passed between Millar and his literary network, and includes the 52 letters that passed between Millar and David Hume, the majority of which have been edited for the first time since 1931. This is a major contribution to the material and intellectual worlds that defined the culture of Enlightenment in Britain during the eighteenth century, casting new light in the history of publishing and authorship.
Author: Gianni Paganini
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487504616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Get Book Here
Book Description
Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment.
Author: Jeffrey Kahan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415288583
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Get Book Here
Book Description
In their own day, the works in this collection of now all-but-forgotten plays, composed between 1710 and 1820, enjoyed much critical and commercial success. For example, Nicholas Rowe's "The Tragedy of Jane Shore" (1714) was the most popular new play of the eighteenth century, and the sixth most performed tragedy, following "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet,"" Othello" and "King Lear." Even William Shirley's forgotten play, "Edward the Black Prince" (1750), "was well received with great applause" and had a stage history spanning three decades. This collection includes the performance text to the 1796 Ireland play, "Vortigern." The plays are all reset and, where possible, modernized from original manuscripts, with listed variants, and parallel passages traced to Shakespearean canonical texts. The set includes a new introduction by the editor, and raises important questions about the nature of artistic property and authenticity, a key area of Shakespearean research today.
Author: Martin J Cawthorne (Foreword by Tim Haynes, Headmaster of Tonbridge School)
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1785898604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book focuses on the twenty-year tenure of James Cawthorn – one of the most significant headmasters in the history of Tonbridge School. In historical accounts of Tonbridge School, Cawthorn is usually depicted as a strict disciplinarian with an almost despotic approach as Headmaster. Boys under his charge are described in turn, as being either terrified of him, humiliated by him or, in the case of one poor soul, locked in a cupboard, forgotten and left to starve to death. He does however act as master and mentor to some of the school’s most prominent Old Boys; notably George Austen, father of the novelist Jane Austen, who after graduating from Oxford returns to Tonbridge in order to become Cawthorn’s Deputy. Cawthorn’s dedication to the school is also such that, during his tenure as Headmaster, the school gets its first purpose built library which appears in part to have been funded from the Head’s own pocket. The establishment of the library was a joint undertaking involving James Cawthorn, George Austen and the Worshipful Company of Skinners’ who govern the school. The development was not however without controversy and the unfortunate death of a schoolboy played a significant part in the saga. George Austen’s involvement also helped to shape the future course of his life and led to him leaving Tonbridge, the town of his birth, and moving instead to Steventon in Hampshire. This book investigates the available historical evidence in order to uncover the story of how the first library building at Tonbridge came to be built and to establish the truth behind the myths surrounding one of the School’s most controversial and enigmatic headmasters. In doing so, it also shines a light on the formative years of the life of George Austen, father of one of Britain’s most much-loved novelists. It will appeal to anyone associated with Tonbridge School; specialist and amateur Kentish historians; and fans of Jane Austen keen to know more about the formative years of the man who was arguably her most important tutor and mentor – her father, George Austen.
