Academic literature on the topic 'English fiction 18th century History and criticism'
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Journal articles on the topic "English fiction 18th century History and criticism":
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Green, Alison. "‘A Supreme Fiction’: Michael Fried and Art Criticism." Journal of Visual Culture 16, no. 1 (April 2017): 89–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470412917700931.
Abstract:
One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.
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Zipfel, Frank. "The Pleasures of Imagination. Aspects of Fictionality in the Poetics of the Age of Enlightenment and in Present-Day Theories of Fiction." Journal of Literary Theory 14, no. 2 (September 25, 2020): 260–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2020-2007.
Abstract:
AbstractInvestigations into the history of the modern practice of fiction encounter a wide range of obstacles. One of the major impediments lies in the fact that former centuries have used different concepts and terms to designate or describe phenomena or ideas that we, during the last 50 years, have been dealing with under the label of fiction/ality. Therefore, it is not easy to establish whether scholars and poets of other centuries actually do talk about what we today call fiction or fictionality and, if they do, what they say about it. Moreover, even when we detect discourses or propositions that seem to deal with aspects of fictionality we have to be careful and ask whether these propositions are actually intended to talk about phenomena that belong to the realm of fiction/ality. However, if we want to gain some knowledge about the history of fiction/ality, we have no other choice than to tackle the arduous task of trying to detect similarities (and differences) between the present-day discourse on fictionality and (allegedly) related discourses of other epochs. The goal of this paper is to make a small contribution to this task.The starting point of the paper are two observations, which also determine the approach I have chosen for my investigations. 1) In the 18th century the terms »fiction« or »fictionality« do not seem to play a significant role in the discussion of art and literature. However, some propositions of the discourse on imagination, one of the most prominent discourses of the Age of Enlightenment, seem to suggest that this discourse deals more or less explicitly with questions regarding the fictionality of literary artefacts as we conceive it today. 2) The concepts of imagination and fictionality are also closely linked in present-day theories of fiction. Naturally, the question arises how the entanglement of the concepts of fictionality and imagination can be understood in a historical perspective. Can it function as a common ground between 18th-century and present-day conceptions of fiction/ality? Is imagination still used in the same ways to explain phenomena of fictionality or have the approaches evolved over the last 250 years and if yes, then how? These kinds of questions inevitably lead to one major question: What do 18th-century and present-day conceptions of fiction/ality have in common, how much and in what ways do they differ?For heuristic reasons, the article is subdivided according to what I consider the three salient features of today’s institutional theories of fiction (i. e. theories which try to explain fictionality as an institutional practice that is determined and ruled by specific conventions): fictive utterance (aspects concerning the production of fictional texts), fictional content (aspects concerning the narrated story in fictional texts) and fictive stance (aspects concerning the reader’s response to fictional texts). The article focusses on the English, French and German-speaking debates of the long 18th century and within these discourses on the most central and, therefore, for the development of the concept of fiction/ality most influential figures. These are, most notably, Madame de Staël, Voltaire, Joseph Addison, Georg Friedrich Meier, Christian Wolff, the duo Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger as well as their adversary Johann Christoph Gottsched.The relevance of the article for a historical approach to the theory of fiction lies in the following aspects. By means of a tentative reconstruction of some carefully chosen propositions of 18th-century discourse on imagination I want to show that these propositions deal in some way or other with literary phenomena and theoretical concepts that in present-day theory are addressed under the label of fiction/ality. By comparing propositions stemming from 18th-century discourse on imagination with some major assertions of present-day theories of fiction I try to lay bare the similarities and the differences of the respective approaches to literary fiction and its conceptualisations. One of the major questions is to what extent these similarities and differences stem from the differing theoretical paradigms that are used to explain literary phenomena in both epochs. I venture some hypotheses about the influence of the respective theoretical backgrounds on the conceptions of fictionality then and today. An even more intriguing question seems to be whether the practice of fictional storytelling as we know and conceive it today had already been established during the 18th century or whether it was only in the process of being established.
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Jenkins, E. R. "English South African children’s literature and the environment." Literator 25, no. 3 (July 31, 2004): 107–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v25i3.266.
Abstract:
Historical studies of nature conservation and literary criticism of fiction concerned with the natural environment provide some pointers for the study of South African children’s literature in English. This kind of literature, in turn, has a contribution to make to studies of South African social history and literature. There are English-language stories, poems and picture books for children which reflect human interaction with nature in South Africa since early in the nineteenth century: from hunting, through domestication of the wilds, the development of scientific agriculture, and the changing roles of nature reserves, to modern ecological concern for the entire environment. Until late in the twentieth century the literature usually endorsed the assumption held by whites that they had exclusive ownership of the land and wildlife. In recent years English-language children’s writers and translators of indigenous folktales for children have begun to explore traditional beliefs about and practices in conservation.
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Mulalić, Lejla. "Redefining the Boundaries of Historical Writing and Historical Imagination in Carolyn Steedman’s Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 10, no. 1 (May 9, 2013): 51–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.10.1.51-61.
Abstract:
One of the dominant features of the late 20th and early 21st century academic debates on the nature of history is a curious form of radicalism both in the ranks of defenders of traditional approaches to history/historiography and eloquent champions of postmodern theories. These debates will provide the context for my reading of Steedman’s Master and Servant, which probes disciplinary boundaries of history and fiction in order to explore the unhistoricised ways of love and labour in 18th century industrial Yorkshire. As Steedman inhabits the position of both a professional historian, with all the ideological implications of that position, and Nelly Dean, a servant and narrator in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, this paper will consider her approach to historical imagination in the light of deconstructionist genre of historical writing.
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ROLLS, ALISTAIR. "Primates in Paris and Edgar Allan Poe’s Paradoxical Commitment to Foreign Languages." Australian Journal of French Studies 58, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 76–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/ajfs.2021.07.
Abstract:
Drawing on recent innovations in detective criticism in France, this article broadens the quest to exonerate Poe’s famous orang-utan and argues that the Urtext of modern Anglo-American crime fiction is simultaneously a rejection of linguistic dominance (of English in this case) and an apologia for modern languages. This promotion of linguistic diversity goes hand in hand with the wilful non-self-coincidence of Poe’s detection narrative, which recalls, and pre-empts, the who’s-strangling-whom? paradox of deconstructionist criticism. Although “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is prescient, founding modern crime fiction for future generations, it is entwined with a nineteenth-century tradition of sculpture that not only poses men fighting with animals but also inverts classical scenarios, thereby questioning the binary of savagery versus civilization and investing animals with the strength to kill humans while also positing them as the victims of human violence.
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Kinkley, Jeffrey C. "The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China. By David Der-Wei Wang. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. 402 pp. ISBN 0-520-23140-6.]." China Quarterly 182 (June 2005): 439–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741005270261.
Abstract:
This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.
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Garcha, Amanpal. "FORGETTING THACKERAY AND UNMAKING CAREERS." Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 2 (May 16, 2018): 531–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150318000128.
Abstract:
One of the peculiar challengesfacing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. TheMLA Bibliographycontains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature –Desire and Domestic Fiction(1987) andThe Novel and the Police(1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson'sThe Powers of Distance(2001), Sharon Marcus'sBetween Women, and Alex Woloch'sThe One vs the Many(2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether fromThe English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence(1970).
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Блашків, О. В. "INTELLECTUALS IN THE FACE OF HISTORIC TURMOIL: “THE REVENGE OF THE PRINTER” BY STANISLAV ROSOVETSKYJ AS ACADEMIC FICTION." Наукові записки Харківського національного педагогічного університету ім. Г. С. Сковороди "Літературознавство" 3, no. 93 (December 20, 2019): 3–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.34142/2312-1076.2019.3.93.01.
Abstract:
Since mid-twentieth century the academic novel has been treated in English literary criticism as a separate literary genre centered on the life of professors. Often the action takes place on and outside of campus, revealing the professors’ private concerns. Satire is a characteristic feature of academic novels, which usually drives the action. In these novels university appears as a “microcosm of society at large.” Even though the academic novel is an emerging genre in Ukrainian literature, there are texts which fall into this category. In the article the author analyzes “The Revenge of the Printer” by Stanislav Rosovetskyj as academic fiction. The novel has two plot lines, one of which is set in late 1580s in the times of Ivan Fedorov, another is set in the summer of 1991. The plot lines are joined by the setting, which is St. Onuphrius Monastery in Lviv, which in the twentieth century was turned into the museum of book-printing. The novel has the following features of the academic fiction: the main setting and the object of satire is theIvanFedorovMuseum, a cloistered institution like the university campus; the protagonist Shalva Bukviani is an academic and a professor of history facing the choice to leave the institution or to conform to the changing ideology. Collectively, these characteristics allow to define the main theme as the role of individual in the times of historical turmoil. Special attention is paid to the image of Fedorov, whose life in the novel is portrayed as a literary biography, based on research of contemporary Ukrainian historians alternative to the Soviet narrative. Due to the image of Fedorov as “Renaissance man” in the novel, the image of contemporary scholar appears as Sick Soul (M. Andryczyk), “a small Soviet man” unable to engage in protection of cultural heritage in the time of sociopolitical change.
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Grane, Leif. "Grundtvigs forhold til Luther og den lutherske tradition." Grundtvig-Studier 49, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 21–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/grs.v49i1.16265.
Abstract:
Grundtvig's Relations with Luther and the Lutheran TraditionBy Leif GraneGrundtvig’s relations with Luther and the Lutheran tradition are essential in nearly the whole of Grundtvig’s lifetime. The key position that he attributed to Luther in connection with his religious crisis 1810-11, remained with the Reformer until the very last, though there were changes on the way in his evaluation of the Reformation.The source material is overwhelming. It comprises all Grundtvig’s historical and church historical works, but also a large number of his theological writings, besides a number of his poems and hymns. Prior to Grundtvig’s lifelong occupation with Luther there had been a rejection of tradition as he had met with it in the Conservative supranaturalism. After the Romantic awakening at Egeløkke and the subsequent »Asarus« (the- ecstatic immersion in Nordic mythology), over the religious crisis 1810-1811, when Grundtvig thought he was »returning« to Luther, it was a different Luther from the one he had left a few years before. Though Grundtvig emphasizes the infallibility of the Bible, it is wrong to describe him as »Lutheran-Orthodox« in the traditional sense. In Grundtvig’s interpretation, Luther is above all the guarantee of the view of history he had acquired in his Romantic period, but given his own personal stamp, as it appeared in slightly different ways in the World Chronicles of 1812 and 1817. There already he turns against the theologization of the message of the Reformation that set in with the confessional writings. Ever since he maintained the view of the Reformation that he expounds in the two World Chronicles, though the evaluation of it changed somewhat, especially after 1825.The church view that Grundtvig presented for the first time in »Kirkens Gienmæle« (The Rejoinder of the Church), and which he explained in detail in »Om den sande Christendom« (About True Christianity) and »Om Christendommens Sandhed« (About the Truth of Christianity), was bound to lead to a conflict (as it did) with the Protestant »Scripturalism«, and thus to clarity about the disagreement with Luther. This conflict attained a greater degree of precision with the distinctions between church and state, and church and school, as they were presented in »Skal den lutherske Reformation virkelig fortsættes?« (Should the Lutheran Reformation Really Be Continued? 1830), but it was not really until the publication of the third part of »Haandbog I Verdens-Historien« (Handbook in World History) that the view of church history and of Luther’s place in it, inspired by the congregational letters in the Apocalypse, was presented, in order to be more closely developed, partly in poetical form in »Christenhedens Syvstjeme« (The Seven Star of Christendom), partly in lectures in »Kirke-Spejl« (Church Mirror).Grundtvig had to reject orthodoxy since the genuineness of Baptism and Eucharist depended on their originating from Christ Himself. Nothing of universal validity could therefore have come into existence in the 16th century.Thus the evaluation of Luther and Lutheranism must depend on how far Lutheranism corresponded to what all Christians have in common. Luther is praised for the discovery that only the Word and the Spirit must reign in the church. It is understandable therefore that Luther had to break down the false idea of the church that had prevailed since Cyprian, and Grundtvig remained unswervingly loyal to him. But he cannot avoid the question why Luther’s work crumbled after his death. The answer is that it crumbled because of »Scripturalism« which Grundtvig considers a spurious inheritance from Alexandrian theology. We must maintain Luther’s faith which centres on all that is fundamentally Christian, but not his theological method.Grundtvig believes that with his criticism of Luther he is really closer to him than those who are cringing admirers of him. Grundtvig confesses himself to having committed the mistake of confusing the Bible with Christianity, and he cannot exempt Luther from a great responsibility for this aberration. All the same, in Luther’s case the wrong Yet Luther was induced to want to make his own experiences universally valid since he did not understand that his own use of the Scriptures could not possibly be right for every man. Here Grundtvig is on the track of the individualism which to him is an inevitable consequence of Scripturalism: everybody reads as he knows best. It was not in school, but in church that he saw Luther’s great and imperishable achievement.So while Grundtvig cannot exempt Luther from some responsibility for an unfortunate development in the relation between church and school, he is very anxious to exempt him from any responsibility for the assumption of power in the church by the princes, which is due, in his opinion, to a conspiracy between the princes and the theologians with a view to tying the peoples to the symbolical books.In the development of Grundtvig’s view of church history it turns out that the interest in the national, cultural and civic significance of the Reformation has not decreased after he has given up fighting for a Christian culture. The Reformation must, as must church history on the whole, be seen in the context of the histories of the peoples. Therefore, if it is not to be pure witchcraft, it must have its foundation deep in the Middle Ages.Grundtvig points to what he calls »the new Christendom«: from the English and the Germans to the North. Viewed in that light, the Reformation is a struggle for a Christian life, a folkelig life of the people, and enlightenment.Though the 17th century wrenched all life out of what was bom in the 16th, and the 18th century abandoned both Christianity and folkelig life altogether, it was of great significance for culture and enlightenment that the people was made familiar with Luther’s catechism, Bible and hymn book. What was fundamentally Christian survived, while folkelig life lay dormant.The Reformation was unfinished, and its completion must wait until the end of time. But compulsion is approaching the end, and the force of the Reformation in relation to mother tongue and folkelig life manifests itself more strongly than ever before, Gmndtvig believes. What is fundamentally Christian in Luther must be maintained and carried onwards, while the Christian enlightenment, i.e. theology, depends on the time in question.Life is the same, but the light is historically determined. With this concept of freedom, which distinguishes between the faith in Christ as permanent and the freedom of the Holy Ghost that liberates us from being tied to the theology of the old, Gmndtvig may convincingly claim that it is he who – with his criticism - is loyal to Luther, i.e. to »the most excellent Father in Christ since the days of the Apostles«.
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Parker, Christopher, Elizabeth Truax, Ivan Roots, Christopher Hill, R. C. Richardson, Joan Thirsk, W. A. Speck, Neil Curtin, Asa Briggs, and William Richardson. "Reviews: Companion to Historiography, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, the Debate on the English Revolution, the Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–49, God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, the Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, the Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory and FictionBentleyMichael (ed.), Companion to Historiography , Routledge, 1997, pp. xvii + 997, £100.HowardJean E. and RackinPhyllis, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories , Routledge, 1997, pp. xviii + 215, £14.99 pb.RichardsonR. C., The Debate on the English Revolution , 3rd ed., Manchester University Press, 1998, pp.x + 262, £14.99.RaymondJoad, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–49 , Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xii + 379, £45.HindsHilary, God's Englishwomen: Seventeenth-century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism , Manchester University Press, 1996, pp. vii + 264, £35, £14.99 pb.CressyDavid, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England , Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 641, £25.00.EllisMarkman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel , Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. xii + 264, £45.AyersEdwards L., and MittendorfBradley C. (eds), The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory and Fiction , Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 597, £30.WinterJay and RobertJean-Louis, Capital Cities at War, 1914–1919 , Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. xviii + 622, £60.NaimanEric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology , Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 307, $39.50, £27.50." Literature & History 8, no. 1 (May 1999): 76–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/lh.8.1.6.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "English fiction 18th century History and criticism":
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Johnson, Nancy E. (Nancy Edna) 1956. "The "equivocal spirit" of law : property, agency and the contract in the English Jacobin novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=29054.
Abstract:
In the 1790s, the English Jacobin novelists became vital participants in the fiery debates over natural and civil rights. Energized by the success of the American Revolution and inspired by the calls for l'egalite, la liberte, la surete, and la propriete in France, the Jacobin authors contributed their narratives to the British campaigns for reform of parliament and extension of the franchise. In this dissertation, I argue that the Jacobin novel furnishes crucial insights into the development of a theory of juridical rights in the late eighteenth century. Working in the early modern traditions of contract theory, writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin embraced the concept of inalienable natural rights. In their novels, they identified the critical role property played in determining the individual's relationship to the law, and they celebrated the emergence of a new kind of citizen distinguished by economic independence, inalienable rights and political agency. But they also offered an important critique of contractarian thought. The Jacobins' narratives revealed the exclusion of certain segments of the population from participation in government formed by contract. Their analyses of the origins of political authority and the constitution of the legal subject render the Jacobin novel a critical component of the history of juridical rights.
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Guthrie, Neil. "A thousand wrecks! : rakes' progresses in some eighteenth century English novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b08473d6-9cae-4a14-b7a7-3e40cf7bb283.
Abstract:
This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).
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Ahern, Stephen. "Between duty and desire : sentimental agency in British prose fiction of the later eighteenth century." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0027/NQ50101.pdf.
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Scott, Linda Kane. "The Inheritance Novel: The Power of Strict Settlement Language in Clarissa, Evelina and Pride and Prejudice." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/ScottLK.pdf.
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Moore, Paul Henry. "Death in the eighteenth-century novel, 1740-1800." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5def918a-a899-4650-8850-efcacf3f4bf1.
Abstract:
This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.
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Shannon, Josephine E. "From discourse to the couch : the obscured self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34533.
Abstract:
Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression.I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.
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Angel-Cann, Lauryn. "Stretched Out on Her Grave: Pathological Attitudes Toward Death in British Fiction 1788-1909." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4271/.
Abstract:
Nineteenth-century British fiction is often dismissed as necrophillic or obsessed with death. While the label of necrophilia is an apt description of the fetishistic representations of dead women prevalent at the end of the century, it is too narrow to fit literature produced earlier in the century. This is not to say that abnormal attitudes toward death are only a feature of the late nineteenth century. In fact, pathological attitudes toward death abound in the literature, but the relationship between the deceased and the survivor is not always sexual in nature. Rather, there is a clear shift in attitudes, from the chaste death fantasy, or attraction to the idea of death, prevalent in Gothic works, to the destructive, stagnant mourning visible in mid-century texts, and culminating in the perverse sexualization of dead women at the turn of the century. This literary shift is most likely attributable to the concurrent changes in attitudes toward sex and death. As sex became more acceptable, more public, via the channels of scientific discourse, death became a less acceptable idea. This “denial of death” is a direct reaction to the religious uncertainties brought about by industrialization. As scientists and industrialists uncovered increasing evidence against a literal interpretation of the Bible, more people began to doubt the nature of God and the existence of an afterlife. If there was no God, then there was no heaven, which raised questions about what happened to the soul after death. With the certainty of an afterlife gone, death became mysterious, something to fear, and the passing of loved ones was doubly-mourned as their fate was now uncertain.
8
Poston, Craig A. (Craig Alan). "The Problematic British Romantic Hero(ine): the Giaour, Mathilda, and Evelina." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278684/.
Abstract:
Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.
9
Bowen, Michael John. "Uncertain affections : representations of trust in the British sentimental novel of the eighteenth century." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38158.
Abstract:
This thesis examines representations of trust in selected British sentimental novels of the eighteenth century. It focuses principally on the manner in which sentimental prose fiction reflects and participates in the shift from premodern to modern formations of trust. Commenting on the nature of modern trust, Anthony Giddens claims that, with the move to modernity, trust relations in the intimate sphere become increasingly dependent on emotional mutuality, while trust in institutions becomes increasingly impersonal and disengaged from assessments of moral character.My work explores this dual shift in three sentimental novels. It first analyzes Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and contends that Richardson denies the concept of honor its epistemological role in practical deliberations. The denial of the epistemology of honor uncouples the mechanism of personal trust from assessments of role and role performance and thus makes the trust in persons in the intimate sphere less dependent on institutional forms of trust. To replace honor's role in the formation of trust, Richardson proposes that the sentiments can provide reliable grounds for trust in the intimate sphere. However, he denies the sentiments a role in the formation of an encompassing social trust among strangers and mere acquaintances. The thesis proceeds to read Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751). In order to argue that Fielding envisioned divergent grounds for trust relations, it maintains that Fielding considers trust relations in the intimate sphere and trust relations in public life as based on the sentiments and fair distribution respectively. To conclude, the thesis investigates Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) to uncover the manner in which Goldsmith distinguishes personal trust in the intimate sphere from general system trust, which Goldsmith ultimately envisions as an ontological trust in providence.
10
Maia, Ludmila de Souza 1984. "Os descaminhos de Clarissa entre o campo e a cidade = o romance de Samuel Richardson e a Sociedade inglesa do século XVIII." [s.n.], 2011. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/279017.
Abstract:
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências HumanasMade available in DSpace on 2018-08-17T12:05:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Maia_LudmiladeSouza_M.pdf: 993926 bytes, checksum: 64b05d09592660e1a62b9845a8551faa (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011
Resumo: Este trabalho se dedica ao estudo do romance epistolar 'Clarissa, or the history of a young lady', de autoria do inglês Samuel Richardson, publicado entre os de anos 1747-48. O propósito é realizar uma pesquisa historiográfica através da interpretação da narrativa literária. A obra, objeto deste estudo, recria muitas das tensões sociais, políticas e religiosas latentes na sociedade inglesa do século XVIII. Os percalços vividos pela heroína da trama, entre o campo e a cidade, permitem analisar as relações sociais e de gênero da Inglaterra das Luzes. A trama conta a história de Clarissa, donzela d aristocracia rural inglesa que recebe a herança do avô, motivando disputas familiares. O primogênito preterido convence a família a casá-la com um homem odioso, para evitar sua independência e lucrar com o negócio. Clarissa se recusa ao matrimônio e passa a ser perseguida dentro de casa. Para escapar da tirania, ela foge para Londres com Lovelace, libertino que lhe faz a corte contra a vontade de sua família. Seu desejo de autonomia é interrompido quando seu raptor a aprisiona num bordel e a violenta. Para preservar sua vontade de virtude e a independência de seu espírito, Clarissa escolhe a morte como única saída moral possível. Com efeito, meu objetivo foi entender aquela sociedade a partir das páginas do romance, cuja análise, também, derivou de questões e referências exteriores à trama
Abstract: This work is dedicated to the novel 'Clarissa, or the history of a Young lady', written by Samuel Richardson, and published in 1747-48. My purpose was to make a historiographic research by using a literary narrative. This novel creates, in a literary way, many of the most important social, political, and religious conflicts of the Eighteenth Century English society. The mishaps of the life of the novel's protagonist, between the country and the city, allowed me to analyze the social and gender relations in the Enlightenment England. The plot tells us the story of Clarissa, an aristocratic maiden in rural England. She inherits an estate from her grandfather, which provokes a familiar disturbance. The deprecated old brother convinces the family to marry her to an odious man, to avoid her independence and to profit from the business. She refuses the marriage and her persecution begins at home. In order to escape from tyranny, she fled to London with the libertine Lovelace, who courts her against her family's will. Her wish for autonomy is interrupted when his abductor imprisons and rapes in a brothel. She wishes virtue and an independent soul, and that's why she chooses death, as the only possible way to maintain her moral intact. Indeed, my goal with this research was to understand the mentioned society from the pages of the novel,whose analysis also comes from questions and references external to the plot
Mestrado
Politica, Memoria e Cidade
Mestre em História
Books on the topic "English fiction 18th century History and criticism":
1
Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer. Novel beginnings: Experiments in eighteenth-century English fiction. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2006.
2
Probyn, Clive T. English fiction of the eighteenth century, 1700-1789. London: Longman, 1987.
3
Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Women's lives and the 18th-century English novel. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991.
4
Rees, Christine. Utopian imagination and eighteenth-century fiction. London: Longman Pub., 1996.
5
Haggerty, George E. Unnatural affections: Women and fiction in the later 18th century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
6
Frank, Judith. Common ground: Eighteenth-century English satiric fiction and the poor. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997.
7
Zimmerman, Everett. The boundaries of fiction: History and the eighteenth-century British novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
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Bartolomeo, Joseph F. A new species of criticism: Eighteenth-century discourse on the novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.
9
Swan, Beth. Fictions of law: An investigation of the law in eighteenth-century English fiction. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1997.
10
Kraft, Elizabeth. Character & consciousness in eighteenth-century comic fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.