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Book Eighteenth century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder

Download or read book Eighteenth century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder written by Sarah Tindal Kareem and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century British fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up against the marvelous. While it is a truism that the period's literature is distinguished by its realism and air of probability, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder argues that wonder is integral to--rather than antithetical to--the developing techniques of novelistic fiction. Positioning its reader on the cusp between recognition and estrangement, between faith and doubt, modern fiction hinges upon wonder. Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder's chapters unfold its new account of British fiction's rise through surprising new readings of classic early novels-from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey--as well as bringing to attention lesser known works, most notably Rudolf Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels. In this bold new account, the eighteenth century bears witness not to the world's disenchantment but rather to wonder's re-location from the supernatural realm to the empirical world, providing a re-evaluation not only of how we look back at the Enlightenment, but also of how we read today.

Book Literary Cultures and Eighteenth Century Childhoods

Download or read book Literary Cultures and Eighteenth Century Childhoods written by Andrew O'Malley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-29 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

Book Criticism  Performance  and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Criticism Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century written by James Harriman-Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions. It was these pivotal transitions, scripted by authors and executed by actors, that could make King Lear beautiful, Hamlet terrifying, Archer hilarious and Zara electrifying. James Harriman-Smith recovers a lost way of appreciating theatre as a set of transitions that produce simultaneously iconic and dynamic spectacles; fascinating moments when anything seems possible. Offering fresh readings and interpretations of Shakespearean and eighteenth-century tragedy, historical acting theory and early character criticism, this volume demonstrates how a concern with transition binds drama to everything, from lyric poetry and Newtonian science, to fine art and sceptical enquiry into the nature of the self.

Book Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Katrin Berndt and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.

Book Death and the Body in the Eighteenth Century Novel

Download or read book Death and the Body in the Eighteenth Century Novel written by Jolene Zigarovich and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses--such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons--the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself--its parts, or its preserved representation--functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich's analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.

Book Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century written by James Bryant Reeves and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents eighteenth-century literary representations of atheism, arguing that opposition to atheism generated unique forms of religious belief.

Book The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Literatures in English

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Literatures in English written by Sarah Eron and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-25 with total page 905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

Book Romanticism and Speculative Realism

Download or read book Romanticism and Speculative Realism written by Chris Washington and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

Book Modes of Play in Eighteenth Century France

Download or read book Modes of Play in Eighteenth Century France written by Fayçal Falaky and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays brings together different critical perspectives on play in eighteenth-century France. From dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries to the ludic nature of narrative and theatrical performance, this volume offers a new outlook on how play was used to represent and reimagine the world.

Book Climate  God and Uncertainty

Download or read book Climate God and Uncertainty written by Arthur C. Petersen and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate, God and Uncertainty moves beyond Bruno Latour’s thought to understand what climate change means for philosophical anthropology and wider culture. What are, for example, the philosophical implications of climate change and its associated uncertainties? Referring mainly to works by Latour, William James and Heinrich Rickert, Petersen develops ‘transcendental naturalism’ to reinterpret the interface between science and politics in the context of climate change. He highlights, for instance, issues such as the religious disenchantment of nature, the scientific disbelief in a plurality of value-laden perspectives, and the disregard for non-modern worldviews in politics. In developing its argument, the book makes a methodological intervention on the sort of naturalism that guides both Latour’s work and a large part of the academic field called ‘science and religion’. Praise for Climate, God and Uncertainty 'The challenges of a changing climate raise disturbing questions about being human in the world, ones that cannot adequately be answered through scientific inquiry. In this original interrogation and extension of the work of Bruno Latour, Petersen constructs a philosophical position that takes seriously the realities of a changing natural world, the human search to ground our sense of value, and the possibility of God. Climate, God and Uncertainty is an exciting new addition to the small, but growing, literature on climate change, religion and philosophy.' Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge ‘This innovative and exciting work explores the rich potential of “transcendental naturalism” as a bridge between science and religion. Drawing on the work of William James, Heinrich Rickert and Bruno Latour, Petersen maps out a fresh approach that goes beyond current accounts of naturalism, opening up a deeply satisfying account of our engagement with the natural world.’ Alister McGrath, Emeritus Andreos Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford ‘How to live with the pervasive reality of uncertainty and a plurality of perspectives in science, religion and politics without playing down the sciences and our responsibilities? The “transcendental naturalism” Arthur Petersen articulates in this book respects science while leaving room for other elements: wonder, judgements and values, and the way we construct provisional models of reality. These issues are especially acute in the context of climate change, when we face the interplay of science and policy. Petersen stresses the importance of imagination to articulate meaning and of recognising a plurality of value-laden perspectives, striving for responsible action and sensitivity to that which may escape planning and policy. This book can be read fruitfully in at least two ways, as a highly relevant reflection on religion and science in the face of climate change and as a profound philosophical analysis of pluralism and provisionality, and hence of living with uncertainty.’ Willem B. Drees, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, Leiden University and of Philosophy of the Humanities, Tilburg University

Book Minds in Motion

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anne M. Thell
  • Publisher : Bucknell University Press
  • Release : 2017-08-31
  • ISBN : 1611488281
  • Pages : 287 pages

Download or read book Minds in Motion written by Anne M. Thell and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central claim of Minds in Motion is that British travel writing of the long eighteenth century functions as an epistemological playing field where authors test empiricist models of engagement with the world while simultaneously seeking out the role of the self and the imagination in producing knowledge. Whether exploring the relationship between the senses and the mind, the narrative viability of experimental detachment, or the literary dynamics of virtual witnessing, eighteenth-century travel authors persistently confront their positionality and raise difficult questions about the nature and value of first-hand experience. In one way or another, they also complicate empiricist ideals by exploring the limits of individual perception and the role of the imagination in generating and relating knowledge. While the genre is often viewed as either numbingly documentary or non-literary and commercial, travel literature actually operates at the front line of the period’s intellectual developments, illustrating both how individual writers grapple with philosophical ideals and how these ideals filter into the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, travel literature directly engages the scientific and philosophical concerns of the period, while it is also widely, avidly read; as such, it offers models for cognitive and rhetorical practices that are evaluated and either embraced or rejected by readers (in a process of identification not unlike that which occurs in early English fiction). Moreover, because eighteenth-century travel literature is so crucial to the development of so many fields—from botany to the novel—it illustrates vividly the divisive energies of discipline and genre formation while also archiving the shared aims and methods of what will become discrete fields of study. Travelogues as diverse as Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) reveal the epistemological circuitry of the eighteenth century and historicize the absorption of the philosophical tendencies that have come to define modernity.

Book Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century written by Jacob Sider Jost and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

Book Without the Novel

Download or read book Without the Novel written by Scott Black and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures. Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Burney’s The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

Book Founded in Fiction

Download or read book Founded in Fiction written by Thomas Koenigs and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original account of the importance of diverse forms of fiction in the early American republic—one that challenges the “rise of the novel” narrative What is the use of fiction? This question preoccupied writers in the early United States, where many cultural authorities insisted that fiction-reading would mislead readers about reality. Founded in Fiction argues that this suspicion made early American writers especially attuned to one of fiction’s defining but often overlooked features—its fictionality. Thomas Koenigs shows how these writers explored the unique types of speculative knowledge that fiction could create as they sought to harness different varieties of fiction for a range of social and political projects. Spanning the years 1789–1861, Founded in Fiction challenges the “rise of novel” narrative that has long dominated the study of American fiction by highlighting how many of the texts that have often been considered the earliest American novels actually defined themselves in contrast to the novel. Their writers developed self-consciously extranovelistic varieties of fiction, as they attempted to reform political discourse, shape women’s behavior, reconstruct a national past, and advance social criticism. Ambitious in scope, Founded in Fiction features original discussions of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known writers, including Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. By reframing the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing varieties of fiction, Founded in Fiction shows how these fictions structured American thinking about issues ranging from national politics to gendered authority to the intimate violence of slavery.

Book The Life of Madame de Beaumount and The Life of Charlotta du Pont

Download or read book The Life of Madame de Beaumount and The Life of Charlotta du Pont written by Penelope Aubin and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin, including the two texts included in this edition—The Life of Madam de Beaumount (1721) and The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723), offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of the novel” in eighteenth-century Britain and about women writers in that era. Aubin’s fast-paced highlights the persistence and vitality of romance as a form of storytelling, and the centrality of teenaged girls to tales that extend far beyond the domestic and amatory modes with which women writers have traditionally been associated. Aubin’s resourceful heroines and the often spectacular violence they engage in in order to defend their lives and bodily integrity against threats allow us a more expansive and exciting view of early eighteenth-century fiction than the current classroom canon often permits. In narratives spanning the globe and featuring pirates, North African corsairs, Jacobites, shipwrecks, and seraglios, Aubin delivers a form of fiction with roots that go back to antiquity and commitments that often feel far more modern than most other texts from the eighteenth century.

Book The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture  1690   1760

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture 1690 1760 written by Darryl P. Domingo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how literature of the early eighteenth century represented a newly fashionable life of amusement and diversion. Chapters explore a range of diversionary preoccupations and argue that the devices of digressive wit adopt similar forms and fulfil similar functions in literature as do diversions in eighteenth-century culture.

Book The Wonders

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Woolf
  • Publisher : Michael O'Mara Books
  • Release : 2019-05-02
  • ISBN : 1789290368
  • Pages : 434 pages

Download or read book The Wonders written by John Woolf and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of the Victorian freak show and circus, and the remarkable cast of characters who performed in them.