Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel PDF Author: Simon Varey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521374835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In this challenging and illustrated study, first published in 1990, Simon Varey relates the idea of space in the major novels of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson to its use in the theory and practice of eighteenth-century architecture. Concepts of divine design, expressed in the work of philosophers and theologians, introduced an ideological element to the notion of space which gave it a heightened significance in contemporary thought. Professor Varey's central argument is that space becomes a political instrument used to establish conformity, assert power and give form to the aspirations of social classes. He draws on a wide range of architectural books, both English and European, and on the example of Bath (focusing in particular on its chief architect in the eighteenth century, John Wood). The discussion of novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones and Clarissa examines narrative as a form of spatial design, the use of architectural imagery to describe people, and the political control of social space.

Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel PDF Author: Simon Varey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521374835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In this challenging and illustrated study, first published in 1990, Simon Varey relates the idea of space in the major novels of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson to its use in the theory and practice of eighteenth-century architecture. Concepts of divine design, expressed in the work of philosophers and theologians, introduced an ideological element to the notion of space which gave it a heightened significance in contemporary thought. Professor Varey's central argument is that space becomes a political instrument used to establish conformity, assert power and give form to the aspirations of social classes. He draws on a wide range of architectural books, both English and European, and on the example of Bath (focusing in particular on its chief architect in the eighteenth century, John Wood). The discussion of novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones and Clarissa examines narrative as a form of spatial design, the use of architectural imagery to describe people, and the political control of social space.

The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space

The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space PDF Author: Nicholas Birns
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498599532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book examines literary representations of hyperlocal spaces that subvert the idea of grounded and organic spatial identities. Figures such as the pond, the scientific particle, and Wedgwood creamware often go unnoticed, but they exemplify important shifts in culture and aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space argues that these objects, as well as locations such as alcoves in remote shires, city inns, and mountain retreats, were portrayed by writers in the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as gambits that challenged cultural hegemonies. It shows that the hyperlocal space or object, though particular, reaches beyond itself, affording an elasticity that can allow those things that seem beneath notice to reveal broader cultural significance.

At Home in the Eighteenth Century

At Home in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Stephen G. Hague
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000449394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The eighteenth-century home, in terms of its structure, design, function, and furnishing, was a site of transformation – of spaces, identities, and practices. Home has myriad meanings, and although the eighteenth century in the common imagination is often associated with taking tea on polished mahogany tables, a far wider world of experience remains to be introduced. At Home in the Eighteenth Century brings together factual and fictive texts and spaces to explore aspects of the typical Georgian home that we think we know from Jane Austen novels and extant country houses while also engaging with uncharacteristic and underappreciated aspects of the home. At the core of the volume is the claim that exploring eighteenth-century domesticity from a range of disciplinary vantage points can yield original and interesting questions, as well as reveal new answers. Contributions from the fields of literature, history, archaeology, art history, heritage studies, and material culture brings the home more sharply into focus. In this way At Home in the Eighteenth Century reveals a more nuanced and fluid concept of the eighteenth-century home and becomes a steppingstone to greater understanding of domestic space for undergraduate level and beyond.

Novel Beginnings

Novel Beginnings PDF Author: Patricia Meyer Spacks
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300128339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding’s The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans à clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history—by no means inexorable—might have taken quite a different course.

The Prose of Things

The Prose of Things PDF Author: Cynthia Sundberg Wall
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622502X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception. In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.

The Closet

The Closet PDF Author: Danielle Bobker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the eighteenth-century closet—and how it fired the imaginations of Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting—and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. In The Closet, Danielle Bobker presents a literary and cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy, revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books, closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual intimacy of the first mass-medium of print. Focused on the connections between status-conscious—and often awkward—interpersonal dynamics and an increasingly inclusive social and media landscape, The Closet examines dozens of historical and fictional encounters taking place in the various iterations of this room: courtly closets, bathing closets, prayer closets, privies, and the "moving closet" of the coach, among many others. In the process, the book conjures the intimate lives of well-known figures such as Samuel Pepys and Laurence Sterne, as well as less familiar ones such as Miss Hobart, a maid of honor at the Restoration court, and Lady Anne Acheson, Swift's patroness. Turning finally to queer theory, The Closet discovers uncanny echoes of the eighteenth-century language of the closet in twenty-first-century coming-out narratives. Featuring more than thirty illustrations, The Closet offers a richly detailed and compelling account of an eighteenth-century setting and symbol of intimacy that continues to resonate today.

Designing Women

Designing Women PDF Author: Tita Chico
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
"Drawing on extensive archival research, Chico argues that the dressing room embodies contradictory connotations, linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet.

Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels PDF Author: Karen Lipsedge
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230355279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Examining the work of three authors: Richardson, Haywood and Burney, and their representation of domestic space, this book argues that to make such spaces accessible to modern readers they need to have information of the real domestic. By recreating specifics of these spaces this book innervates the fictional domestic interior for modern readers.

Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels PDF Author: Karen Lipsedge
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137283505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Examining the work of three authors: Richardson, Haywood and Burney, and their representation of domestic space, this book argues that to make such spaces accessible to modern readers they need to have information of the real domestic. By recreating specifics of these spaces this book innervates the fictional domestic interior for modern readers.

Space and the 'March of Mind'

Space and the 'March of Mind' PDF Author: Alice Jenkins
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191526177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book is about the idea of space in the first half of the nineteenth century. It uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give a new account of nineteenth-century literature's relationship with science. In particular it brings the physical sciences - physics and chemistry - more accessibly and fully into the arena of literary criticism than has been the case until now. Writers whose work is discussed in this book include many who will be familiar to a literary audience (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt), some well-known in the history of science (including Faraday, Herschel, and Whewell), and a raft of lesser-known figures. Alice Jenkins draws a new map of the interactions between literature and science in the first half of the nineteenth century, showing how both disciplines were wrestling with the same central political and intellectual concerns - regulating access to knowledge, organising knowledge in productive ways, and formulating the relationships of old and new knowledges. Space has become a subject of enormous critical interest in literary and cultural studies. Space and the 'March of Mind' gives a wide-ranging account of how early nineteenth-century writers thought about - and thought with - space. Burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development to create a crisis in managing knowledge. Contemporary writers tried to solve this crisis by rethinking the nature of space. Writers in all genres and disciplines, from all points on the political spectrum, returned again and again to ideas and images of space when they needed to set up or dismantle boundaries in the intellectual realm, and when they wanted to talk about what kinds of knowledge certain groups of readers wanted, needed, or deserved. This book provides a rich new picture of the early nineteenth century's understanding of its own culture.