You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Before Jane Austen's novels explored heroines in English society, writers Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier dared to provide commentary on gender and education through self-conscious narratives. Published in 1754 in five parts and divided into three volumes, The Cry stands as one of the most distinctive and intriguing works by women during the florescence of their writing in eighteenth-century England. Strikingly experimental—mixing fiction and philosophy, drama and exposition, satire and irony, and singular and choral voices—The Cry revolves around a main character, Portia, who tells a series of stories to an audience that includes Una, the allegorical representation of truth, and "The Cr...
First published in 1983, Dean Swift is the concluding book in a series of three volumes providing a detailed exploration of the events of Swift’s life. The third volume follows Swift’s life and career from 1714 to 1745 and sets it against the public events of the age, paying close attention to political and economic change, ecclesiastical problems, social issues, and literary history. It traces Swift’s rise to becoming first citizen of Ireland and looks in detail at the composition, publication, and reception of Gulliver’s Travels, as well as many of Swift’s other works, both poetry and prose. It also explores Swift’s later years, his love affairs with Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh, his complicated friendships with Pope, Lord Bolingbroke, and Archbishop King, and his declining health. Dean Swift is a hugely detailed insight into Swift’s life from 1714 until his death and will be of interest to anyone wanting to find out more about his life and works.
This book discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century.
This volume completes the edition's coverage of Henry Fielding's journalism, which occupied a far greater part of his time than has been traditionally acknowledged. His contributions to The Champion are not only among his most energetic and intriguing works in the genre; they also have a densepolitical background, of interest to historians studying the interface between journalism and politicians of the time, as well as the role of newspaper publishers. Walpole figures hugely, and the extent to which Fielding hints at the minister's life and activities is remarkable.Much of the volume's material has never been reprinted before. Explanatory annotations are full, as the characteristically allusive and topical nature of Fielding's writing requires. Appendices provide an analytical textual apparatus, and the editorial introductions emphasize matters such as genesisand composition, circumstances of publication, in addition to immediate biographical, literary, and historical backgrounds.
Traditional critical editing, defined by the paper and print limitations of the book, is now considered by many to be inadequate for the expression and interpretation of complex works of literature. At the same time, digital developments are permitting us to extend the range of text objects we can reproduce and investigate critically - not just books, but newspapers, draft manuscripts and inscriptions on stone. Some exponents of the benefits of new information technologies argue that in future all editions should be produced in digital or online form. By contrast, others point to the fact that print, after more than five hundred years of development, continues to set the agenda for how we think about text, even in its non-print forms. This important book brings together leading textual critics, scholarly editors, technical specialists and publishers to discuss whether and how existing paradigms for developing and using critical editions are changing to reflect the increased commitment to and assumed significance of digital tools and methodologies.
Alexander Pettit analyzes the formation of and the reaction against the notion of a unified opposition to England's de facto prime minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), the "great man" of Scriblerian satire who was reviled throughout the 1730s for his hostility to the belles lettres, his alleged disregard of the royal prerogative, and his concentration of power in an oligarchy of parliamentary "placemen." The discussion draws extensively on ephemeral plays, sermons, pamphlets, and newspapers that in their own day were regarded as significant contributions to the political debate. Pettit shows that the myth of coherent anti-Walpoleanism was promoted vigorously by Henry St. John, Viscount B...
Taking her title from the British term for legal study, "to read for the law," Christine L. Krueger asks how "reading for the law" as literary history contributes to the progressive educational purposes of the Law and Literature movement. She argues that a multidisciplinary "historical narrative jurisprudence" strengthens narrative legal theorists' claims for the transformative powers of stories by replacing an ahistorical opposition between literature and law with a history of their interdependence, and their embeddedness in print culture. Focusing on gender and feminist advocacy in the long nineteenth century, Reading for the Law demonstrates the relevance of literary history to feminist j...
This is the second of three volumes representing the only modern edition of Fielding's dramatic works. Most of these plays have not appeared in print for a century, and never previously in fully-edited form. Fielding is best known as a classic novelist and the author of Tom Jones, but like his great model Cervantes, he came to novel-writing from an important first career in professional theatre. He wrote twenty-eight plays, including comedies, satiric extravaganzas, and ballad operas. He was the leading playwright of his generation, an experimentalist and entrepreneur of dramatic form who sometimes also brought contemporary politics and public figures onto his stage with results even more dr...
"Fair Philosopher, the first sustained scholarly study of The Female Spectator, brings together an impressive collection of established and upcoming Haywood scholars who challenge much of the received opinion about this groundbreaking journal. Several of the essays show that Haywood's periodical was far more political than is generally thought, that its connections to her career as a novelist are more intimate than has been recognized, and that The Spectator was a target as well as a model. This collection makes a convincing argument that Haywood's periodical deserves far more critical attention than it has received so far and suggests new lines of development for future Haywood scholarship."--Publisher's website.
Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessari...