Eighteenth-Century Genre And Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms : Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874137594 ISBN 13: 9780874137590

Publisher: University of Delaware Press, 2001

Synopsis

Fourteen distinguished scholars explore the relationships between history, literary forms, and the cultural contexts of British literature in the long 18th century, from Chudleigh and Defoe to Frances Brooke and Lord Byron. The first three essays study the contexts of texts before novels. Janine Barchas scrutinizes the historical circumstances of late 17th century print culture in the works of Mary, Lady Chudleigh. Kathryn R. King, examining such contexts as readership, gender, print culture, and the politics of criticism, and disputes the usual characterization of early amatory fiction as simpleminded. Gender and politics are equally central to John O'Brien's analysis of Susanna Centlivre's use of plot as a figure for mastery and control over the disruptive force of contingency. Four essays freshly attack some long-standing literary and historical vexations: John Richetti explores the dialogical negotiations between the secular and the religious in Robinson Crusoe; Joseph M. Levine recuperates the historical scholarship of William Wotton and, in so doing, uncovers Augustan anxieties about the study of history; and Martin C. Battestin accounts for Dr. Johnson's surprising preference for Richardson over Fielding. Fielding is also the focus in Timothy Dykstal's exploration of how the Lockean theory of habit formation helps account for the formal failure of Amelia. In a wide-ranging essay, Claude Rawson scrutinizes the representations of adventurers in the Augustan age and in Byron. Three essays offer major reassessments of genres from the last half of the eighteenth century. Spacks argues that resolute ambiguity is the defining feature of novels of sensibility. Paula R. Backscheider re-examines the political and philosophical complexity of novels by women between 1760 and 1788. Kristina Straub focuses on the connections among class, gender, and narrative form in the criminal biographies of the 1770s....

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0874137594
• ISBN 13: 9780874137590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 316
• Editor: Todd Dennis, Wall Cynthia, Hunter Paul J.