The author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is often seen as an anachronism — either a belated exponent of learned-wit satire whose kinship is with Montaigne, or a proto-modernist whose narrative pyrotechnics anticipate Joyce. Yet to many...
moreThe author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is often seen as an anachronism — either a belated exponent of learned-wit satire whose kinship is with Montaigne, or a proto-modernist whose narrative pyrotechnics anticipate Joyce. Yet to many contemporaries Sterne's writing was emphatically of its immediate time, a voguish compound of all things modern that seemed to typify, if not indeed constitute, a ‘Shandy-Age’. This book demonstrates the self-conscious imbrication of Tristram Shandy in the diverse literary culture of its extended moment. Not only absorbing but also updating Swift's Tale of a Tub, Sterne's text turns the satirical resources of Scriblerian writing on the post-Scriblerian literary marketplace, and above all on that quintessentially modern genre, the novel itself. For all its anticipation of later trends, Sterne's play on narrative representation, linguistic indeterminacy, the unruliness of reading, and the materiality of text turns out to be firmly grounded in the conventions and tropes of mid-18th-century fiction. Through the mechanisms of improvisatory serialization and literary intertextuality, he could also engage with other new texts and trends as they continued to emerge, including ‘Nonsense Club’ satire, the Ossianic vogue, and debates about the Seven Years War.
Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control...
morePhases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control between 1780 and 1820. But control was becoming more difficult in practice, and the consequences for poetry and other literary genres are sometimes overstated at a time when the overwhelming priority for the authorities was cheap (or worse, free) radical print. This chapter surveys key cases of prosecution and/or pillorying across the period (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Walter Cox, William Hone, William Cobbett), and argues that the writers now central to the Romantic canon were relatively unaffected. The striking exception is Robert Southey, whose incendiary Wat Tyler, which embarrassingly emerged at the height of Southey’s Tory pomp two decades later, is newly contextualized and interpreted.
Eighteenth-century cases from Nathaniel Mist and Edmund Curll to John Shebbeare and a printer of Wilkes’s North Briton gave rise to a new satirical trope, frequently found in the 1730–80 period, in which the pillory becomes a tool of...
moreEighteenth-century cases from Nathaniel Mist and Edmund Curll to John Shebbeare and a printer of Wilkes’s North Briton gave rise to a new satirical trope, frequently found in the 1730–80 period, in which the pillory becomes a tool of self-promotion. The marketability of seditious libel is further illustrated by the aftermath of the Stage Licensing Act (1737), which muted opposition drama but in so doing also boosted opposition print. The Champion, Henry Fielding’s first political journal, is a peculiarly powerful instance of this phenomenon, and highlights the ingenuity of Fielding’s play with codes, disguises, and interpretative cues throughout his literary career. Samuel Johnson, another writer who cut his teeth in the satirical campaign against Walpole after the Stage Licensing Act, was still reflecting, as late as the Lives of the Poets (1779–81), on questions arising from that campaign about censorship, authorship, and the book trade.
Historians of the novel and theoreticians of narrative rarely comment on a publishing development contemporaneous with the novel’s rise: the relatively sudden supersession of the busy, cluttered page that typifies seventeenth-century book...
moreHistorians of the novel and theoreticians of narrative rarely comment on a publishing development contemporaneous with the novel’s rise: the relatively sudden supersession of the busy, cluttered page that typifies seventeenth-century book production by the clean, modernised layout that prevails in the eighteenth century. Yet if a primary concern of the realist novel is to give a transparent window on a fictional world, uncomplicated by overt mediating factors, the illusion depends as much on typographic convention as on narrative technique. The first quarter of the eighteenth century saw what one book historian has called a ‘revolution … in the appearance of the printed page’: a revolution that swept away conventions of presentation, including heavy use of rules, decorative borders and marginal apparatus, often with enclosure of text in boxed-rule borders, some of which derive originally from the manuscript codex.2 By reducing or eliminating obtrusive features of this kind, the streamlined page that took hold after 1700, alongside the elegant Franco-Dutch founts introduced by refugee Huguenot printers and made fashionable under William III, visually de-emphasised the materiality of print in ways promoting immediacy of access to literary content. In a poem to celebrate the modernity of Bernard Lintot’s Miscellany (1712), John Gay commented on the clarity not only of the poetic voices assembled by Lintot (Addison, Congreve, Pope, Prior) but also of his typographic style, which rejected the native crudeness of Grubstreet for sleeker continental models.
On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, ‘English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government’. It’s certainly true that the system of prior...
moreOn the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, ‘English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government’. It’s certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment—the pillory—that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise co...
This essay approaches the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 as constituting, by most Enlightenment and modern definitions, a civil war, and considers the implications for poems written during or soon after the rising by William Collins, Hester...
moreThis essay approaches the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 as constituting, by most Enlightenment and modern definitions, a civil war, and considers the implications for poems written during or soon after the rising by William Collins, Hester Mulso (later Chapone), Tobias Smollett, and others. Classical tropes of civil war are among the literary features structuring these poems, which often take the form, more specifically, of odes, exploiting the formal capacity of the ode to dramatize internal division. Roman concepts of bellum civile and “Intestine Wars” (Pope’s Pharsalian expression from Windsor-Forest) are obviously to the fore. So, more interestingly, are the Athenian syntagmata recently emphasized by Nicole Loraux and, following her, Giorgio Agamben: stasis emphylos, an internecine conflict particular to the phylon, to lineage or blood kinship; haima homaimon, the murder of a blood relation, literally blood of the same blood; oikeios polemos, war within the household or among kinsm...
A Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts and ideas that have shaped and transformed it over the past thirteen centuries. Its four volumes cover literature from all periods and...
moreA Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts and ideas that have shaped and transformed it over the past thirteen centuries. Its four volumes cover literature from all periods and places in Britain and demonstrate the wide variety of approaches to studying the subject. Provides the most inclusive and far-reaching overview of British literature from 700-2000, across four volumes and over 100 chapters Discusses the historical, social, political, domestic, linguistic, institutional and material contexts in which British literature has been produced Written by an internationally diverse range of expert contributors including both distinguished academics and up-and-coming young stars Joins readings across geographical, cultural, institutional, economic and mediological contextsDemonstrates to students and teachers alike a wide range of possible approaches to the study of British literature A general index and a thematic table of contents enable readers to navigate the development of British Literature
Page 1. -7 3 '> A CASE 3 C Thomas Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy A CASEBOOK This One ZRUU-TDC-W5YO Page 6. CASEBOOKS IN CRITICISM recent tities...
morePage 1. -7 3 '> A CASE 3 C Thomas Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy A CASEBOOK This One ZRUU-TDC-W5YO Page 6. CASEBOOKS IN CRITICISM recent tities Chinua Achebe's Things ...
Central to Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity, in which divinely guaranteed truth gives way to the personal and human, is ‘the massive subjective turn … in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’. This...
moreCentral to Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity, in which divinely guaranteed truth gives way to the personal and human, is ‘the massive subjective turn … in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’. This chapter approaches the ‘subjective turn’ of Romantic literature by way of its philosophical and literary antecedents in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the instability or inscrutability of personal identity as conceived in Hume, Sterne, and the emergent genre of autobiography. The most powerful autobiographies of the Romantic era—if we include such generically complex cases as The Prelude and Biographia Literaria—inherit and develop a Shandean sense of the problematics of their own enterprise. Yet their fascination with the processes of cognition, and more broadly with mental operations, conscious or unconscious, also bears the mark of more recent psychological discourses; they articulate a new sense of subjectivity as constituted by the creativ...
The creator of Lovelace, the most adroit and beguiling manipulator in eighteenth-century fiction, was in his own life unusually susceptible to deception and fraud. In Samuel Richardson's last years, having made compassionate loans...
moreThe creator of Lovelace, the most adroit and beguiling manipulator in eighteenth-century fiction, was in his own life unusually susceptible to deception and fraud. In Samuel Richardson's last years, having made compassionate loans totalling £50 to Eusebius Silvester, a feckless attorney he came to regard as a confidence trickster, he sought to retrieve his full correspondence widi Silvester as a memorial of exploited trust. He wished (as he instructed a proxy to tell Silvester)
Volume 1: Apparatus Shamela Verse Responses Richardson's Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion to the second edition (1741) Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741) Richardson's Preface and Conclusion to volumes III and IV (1741)...
moreVolume 1: Apparatus Shamela Verse Responses Richardson's Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion to the second edition (1741) Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741) Richardson's Preface and Conclusion to volumes III and IV (1741) Richardson's Preliminary matter to the octavo edition (1742) Verse Responses: Anon, 'Advice to Booksellers (after reading Pamela)' (1741) Poems from the London Magazine Josiah Relph, 'Wrote after Reading Pamela' (1747) Belinda, 'To the Author of Pamela' (1745) George Bennet, extract from Pamela Versified (1741) Anon, 'Pamela the Second'(1742) J- W-, Pamela: or, The Fair Impostor (1743) Volume 2: Prose Criticism Visual Representations Review from History of the Works of the Learned (1740) Anon, Pamela Censured (1741) Charles Povey, The Virgin in Eden (1741) Abbe Marquet (?), Lettre sure Pamela (1742) Visual Representations: John Carwitham, Engravings from The Life of Pamela (1741) Hubert Gravelot and Frances Hayman, Engravings from the octavo edition (1742) Frances Hayman, 'Pamela Fleeing from Lady Davers' (c. 1741-2) Hubert Gravelot, 'Pamela and the Fortune-Teller' (1740s) Joseph Highmore, Engravings of scenes from Pamela (1745) Robert Feke, 'Pamela Andrews' (early 1740s) Philip Mercier, Three paintings of Pamela (c. 1745-50) Volume 3: Anti-Pamela Memoirs of the Life of Lady H- Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela (1741) Memoirs of the Life of Lady H- (1741) Volumes 4 and 5: Pamela's Conduct in High Life John Kelly, Pamela's Conduct in High Life (1741) Volume 6: Dramatic and Operatic Adaptations Henry Giffard, Pamela. A Comedy (1741) James Dance (?), Pamela or, Virtue Triumphant (1741) Joseph Dorman, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. An Opera (1742) Anon, Mock-Pamela (1750) Carlo Goldoni, Pamela. A Comedy (1750, translated 1756)
Rasselas is the conscious beneficiary of earlier editions, while also developing its own modern focus. Like Chapman and Hardy, it prints the text of the second, corrected edition of 1759 and maintains first-edition readings in some cases...
moreRasselas is the conscious beneficiary of earlier editions, while also developing its own modern focus. Like Chapman and Hardy, it prints the text of the second, corrected edition of 1759 and maintains first-edition readings in some cases of compositional error. It has a chronology, a useful (though obvious) bibliography, and a helpful glossary of unfamiliar words that
It is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors. The prime example is...
moreIt is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors. The prime example is Henry Mackenzie, whose much-reprinted The Man of Feeling (1771), with its successors The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigne (1777), made him the most fashionable novelist of his day. With its trembling alertness to the minutiae of suffering and sympathy, and the plaintive silences of its fractured narrative form, The Man of Feeling is the exemplary sentimental text. Yet Mackenzie was to retire from novel writing in his early thirties, and in an essay of 1785 he gave systematic development to anxieties about sentimental fiction and its ethical basis that had already quietly haunted his three novels. Surveying the emergent subgenres of fiction, he detects in ‘that species called the Sentimental ’ a dangerous subversion of its central claim: that by engaging readers' sympathies with misfortune, it could activate, as well as merely represent, ‘the most exalted benevolence’. Feeling had become an end in itself, narcissistically attentive to nothing more than its own exquisiteness. Deploring the inertia of ‘refined sentimentalists … who open their minds to impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct’, Mackenzie attributes to sentimental fiction a ‘separation of conscience from feeling’ which is, he adds, ‘a depravity of the most pernicious sort’. Even in its foremost examples, it cultivates nothing better than self-admiration, and disengages the will from forms of practical action that only less modish virtues – duty, principle – have the power to impel.
... A hanger is a steep-sloped or 'hang-ing'wood, as at Colonel Brandon's picturesque Delaford Hanger (SS 3: 14: 425), and there was a real-life North Hanger Farm outside Southampton, where Austen resided between leaving...
more... A hanger is a steep-sloped or 'hang-ing'wood, as at Colonel Brandon's picturesque Delaford Hanger (SS 3: 14: 425), and there was a real-life North Hanger Farm outside Southampton, where Austen resided between leaving Bath in 1806 and settling at Chawton three years ...
It is fifty years since Gunter Muller's essay on the distinction between erzahlte Zeit (the narrated time) and Erzahlzeit (the time of narrating),[1] and in the intervening period narrative theory has preoccupied itself fruitfully...
moreIt is fifty years since Gunter Muller's essay on the distinction between erzahlte Zeit (the narrated time) and Erzahlzeit (the time of narrating),[1] and in the intervening period narrative theory has preoccupied itself fruitfully with relations between the two. Yet the latter category has in general been seen as an awkward fiction, existing only as some vague extrapolation to be made from a measurable quantity of text. Gerard Genette devotes three chapters of his Discours du Recit to analysing 'relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative', but he signals his anxiety in the parenthesis: the second feature is no more than a convenient inference, mere '(pseudo-) time' as opposed to the real thing, because 'written narrative exists in space and as space', and 'has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading'.[2] He develops this reservation when insisting that the real duration of a narrative, as opposed to the space it occupies on paper, is necessarily unquantifiable: 'What we spontaneously call [the duration of a narrative] can be nothing more [. . .] than the time needed for reading; but it is too obvious that reading time varies according to particular circumstances, and that, unlike what happens in movies, or even in music, nothing here allows us to determine a "normal" speed of execution' (p. 86). In this Genette gains the agreement of Paul Ricoeur. 'What we are measuring, under the name of Erzahlzeit, is, as a matter of convention, a chronological time, equivalent to the number of pages and lines in the published work', writes Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, and he finds consensus between both Muller and Genette in their use of this term 'to be the equivalent of and the substitute for the time of reading, that is, the time it takes to cover or traverse the space of the text'. Indeed, the major revisions proposed by Ricoeur to the positions of both these predecessors begin from the same assumption: 'I shall not go back over the impossibility of measuring the duration of the narrative, if by this is meant the time of reading. Let us admit with Genette that we can only compare the respective speeds of the narrative and of the story, the speed always being defined by a relation between a temporal measure and a spatial one.'[3] There can be no doubting the theoretical power of these studies, and no doubting the light they cast on the complex temporal relations between narrative and story in particular texts (A la recherche du temps perdu in Genette's case, to which Ricoeur adds Mrs Dalloway and Der Zauberberg). Yet by using such terms as 'reading time' or 'the time of reading' in this imprecise way, or by subsuming these terms within the category of Erzahlzeit or the time of narrating, they miss a further distinction available only to a narratology that looks beyond the text to consider its conditions of publication and reception. Rigorous scrutiny is turned by Genette on the relations (and specifically the variations and distortions) of order, duration, and frequency that exist between narrated story and narrative discourse in his chosen example, without significant reference being made to the way in which the elaborate interplay between these categories is complicated, at least for Proust's original audience, by a third temporal feature: the progressiveness of the work's disclosure between publication of Du cote de chez Swann in 1913 and that of Le temps retrouve fourteen years later. Yet publication over time is not a phenomenon confined to the exceptional category of the roman fleuve, and in Britain the serialization of individual novels (either in independent numbers or magazine instalments), though far from universal, is among the defining features of the genre in its classic (Victorian) period. When in this context we consider a category such as Genette's duration (which measures the acceleration or deceleration of the narrative text in relation to the events narrated), it becomes clear that in many cases the schedule of first publication, and thus the time of reading for the original audience, is a distinct feature that further complicates the experience of temporality in a narrative text. …
and Clarissa are after all examples of patriarchal structuring of gender relations, and they are the resolutions of a "political unconscious" that is more traditionally "male" than, for instance, the conclusions of...
moreand Clarissa are after all examples of patriarchal structuring of gender relations, and they are the resolutions of a "political unconscious" that is more traditionally "male" than, for instance, the conclusions of fiction by Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, or Eliza Haywood. Kahn reminds us that the Chevalier d'Eon changed his sexual persona so many times that even his closest friends began to doubt his sex. Readers of both texts may move in and out of this same confusion while they read, but, as her metaphor of the transvestite implies, finally there is no doubt of the gender of these novelists. They want to dress as women; they do not want to be women. Just as the transvestite's costume always threatens to become theatrical or parodie and expose his true sex and the political categories that sex is, the stories that Defoe and Richardson tell produce a disruptive power that threatens to expose the authors even as they simultaneously exemplify, reveal, and criticize hegemonic structures and modes of domination.
Fiction before Defoe had little or no place in the histories and anthologies that defined the novel genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In twentieth-century scholarship, it proved hard to accommodate in accounts...
moreFiction before Defoe had little or no place in the histories and anthologies that defined the novel genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In twentieth-century scholarship, it proved hard to accommodate in accounts of generic development emphasizing formal realism as the sine qua non of the modern novel. Yet a large and lively body of prose fiction was produced between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, of interest not only for its anticipation of later developments but also for characteristics impossible to assimilate in linear stories of generic evolution. Fiction of the period (by authors and translators including Aphra Behn, Walter Charleton, William Congreve, John Dunton, Roger L’Estrange, and Henry Neville) was eclectic, experimental, and heterogeneous, and it displays modes and procedures in the process of formation, not any settled consensus about narrative practice.
Chronology Introduction Thomas Keymer 1. Laurence Sterne's life, milieu, and literary career Ian Campbell Ross 2. Scriblerian satire, A Political Romance, the 'Rabelaisian Fragment', and the origins of Tristram Shandy Marcus...
moreChronology Introduction Thomas Keymer 1. Laurence Sterne's life, milieu, and literary career Ian Campbell Ross 2. Scriblerian satire, A Political Romance, the 'Rabelaisian Fragment', and the origins of Tristram Shandy Marcus Walsh 3. Tristram Shandy, learned wit, and Enlightenment knowledge Judith Hawley 4. Tristram Shandy and eighteenth-century narrative Robert Folkenflik 5. The Sermons of Mr Yorick: the commonplace and the rhetoric of the heart Tim Parnell 6. A Sentimental Journey and the failure of feeling Thomas Keymer 7. Sterne's 'politicks', Ireland, and evil speaking Carol Watts 8. Words, sex, and gender in Sterne's novels Elizabeth W. Harries 9. Sterne and print culture Christopher Fanning 10. Sterne and visual culture Peter de Voogd 11. Sterne and the Modernist moment Melvyn New 12. Postcolonial Sterne Donald R. Wehrs Further reading Index.