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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Abdurakhmanova-Pavlova, Daria V. "John Woolman’s image in the English non-fiction in the 1850–1940s: Hagiographical motives." Izvestiya of Saratov University. Philology. Journalism 22, no. 2 (May 23, 2022): 177–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.18500/1817-7115-2022-22-2-177-185.
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John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker preacher, is known in the history of American literature for his spiritual autobiography titled The Journal (1774). The 1850–1940s is a period when Woolman’s autobiographical character attracts the attention of British and American critics and essay writers. They publish a significant number of non-fiction texts, which contain numerous elements of hagiography in Woolman’s portraiture, depicting him as a saintly proto-abolitionist figure. According to recent studies, the pioneering role in Woolman’s literary “sanctification” belonged to the 19th century American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and it was his essays about Woolman that established the “hagiographical” tradition. The paper suggests, however, that the poet followed the tradition which had started earlier. The following “hagiographical” elements may be distinguished in the analyzed non-fiction texts: 1) (semi-) anonymity of several texts; 2) frequent use of the adjective “saint” in reference to Woolman; 3) overestimation of Woolman’s historical significance as “the first abolitionist”; comparisons with famous saints; 4) the motif of being born in “a pious family” and “eulogizing on the birthplace of the saint”; 5) historically inaccurate portrayal of Woolman as a poor and semiliterate person; 6) emphasizing such psychological traits as childlikeness and absolute truthfulness. The conclusion is that Woolman’s sanctification was promoted by the historical situation in the USA of the 1850–1940s as well as by The Journal itself and a certain “flexibility” inherent in Woolman’s autobiographical text.
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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.
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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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Khramov, Alexander. "Did God create fossils? Notes on the history of an idea." St. Tikhons' University Review 104 (December 29, 2022): 29–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.15382/sturi2022104.29-45.
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The subject of the paper is prochronism, e.g. the teaching which says that the world was created with the appearance of old age. It is shown that the sources of prochronism could be traced to the medieval doctrine of double truth and philosophy of Descartes, who suggested that cosmological theories on the origin of the Universe are purely conditional, while in fact the world was instantly created complete and mature. The idea of apparent, but non-existent past gained much credence during the first half of the 19th century, when paleontological and geological discoveries raised a question on how to square the age of the Earth and the life on it with the six days of Genesis. The hypothesis of prochronism was most fully developed in «Omphalos: an attempt to untie the geological knot» (1857), the book by the English naturalist P. Gosse. During the Darwinian time the interest in this doctrine was shown not only by Christian thinkers, but also by secular philosophers and science fiction writers. Elements of prochronism were also present in the writings of Scriptural geologists in the 19th century and their successors, the young earth creationists in the 20th century. The main objections against prochronism are critically considered. According to the most popular of them, if God had made the world appear older that it is, He thus would have deceived people. But from the point of view of prochronism, the creation of traces of never existed past was necessitated by the logic of causality, which required God to actualize all the consequences of historical epochs skipped by Him. The link between prochronism and the problem of pre-human sufferings is outlined. The conclusion is made that this doctrine, despite being counter-intuitive and rather notorious, is intellectually consistent and immune to the criticism.
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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.
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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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Tetenova, Mariia Aleksandrovna. "Edgar Allan Poe's journey to Russia: fiction and reality." Litera, no. 6 (June 2024): 28–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8698.2024.6.70956.
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This study highlights the history of E.A. Poe's work on the Russian literary scene, shedding light on the cultural, historical and editorial factors that determined its existence in Russia in the nineteenth century. In analysing the translations, we have resorted to the study of existing studies on the subject, archival materials of the Russian press, literary criticism etc. The aim of the study was to reconstruct the specific context and the specific conditions under which the work of Poe penetrated into Russia, which would also allow us to illustrate the key role of translators in the presentation of Poe on the Russian, French, and world literary scene. The subject of our study was the special conditions that determined the penetration of Poe's work in Russia. The object of the study was the biographies written by different people in different eras, as well as documents that influenced his image. The main method of the study was a comparative analysis of texts that tell about Poe's life and personality. The main result of the research is the reconstruction of the ‘route’, following which Poe's work came to Russia, as well as the identification of all the key persons, without whom Poe's work would have to wait for its time. The article also contributes to our understanding of the historical and cultural context that determined the appearance of Poe on the Russian literary scene, as well as names the most important writers, researchers and translators who paved the way for Poe to come to Russia. Scientific novelty is provided by creating a synthesis of existing studies on this topic in Russian, French and English, which allows to make the most complete three-dimensional picture and chronology of the existence of Poe's work which also provides theoretical significance of the study.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.<br>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/.
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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.
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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/.
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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.
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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.
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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.<br>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.
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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.
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Previous issue date: 2011<br>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<br>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<br>Mestrado<br>Politica, Memoria e Cidade<br>Mestre em História
Books on the topic "English fiction 18th century History and criticism"
1
Probyn, Clive T. English fiction of the eighteenth century, 1700-1789. London: Longman, 1987.
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Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Women's lives and the 18th-century English novel. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991.
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3
J, Richetti John, ed. The Cambridge companion to the Eighteenth-Century novel. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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4
Halperin, John. Jane Austen's lovers: And other studies in fiction and history from Austen to le Carré. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.
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5
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.
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Kraft, Elizabeth. Character & consciousness in eighteenth-century comic fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.
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8
Heinz, Sarah, and Nora Kuster. Subject cultures: The English novel from the 18th to the 21st century. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2016.
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9
Backscheider, Paula R. A companion to the eighteenth-century English novel and culture. Chichester, West Sussex [England]: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
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10
W, Uphaus Robert, ed. The Idea of the novel in the eighteenth century. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "English fiction 18th century History and criticism"
1
France, Peter, and Kenneth Haynes. "Philosophy, History, and Travel Writing." In The Oxford History Of Literary Translation In English, 473–504. Oxford University PressOxford, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199246236.003.0011.
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Abstract The translation of non-fiction (a category invented in the nineteenth century and developed for the use of libraries) is represented in this chapter by philosophy, history, biography, political and social criticism, and the literature of travel and exploration, the last being a capacious genre, combining science with historical and philosophical reflections. Such works accounted for more than a third of the published translations in the years examined in Chapter 4, above, and they include several popular and critical successes, such as the several histories by Guizot or Humboldt’s Cosmos. The discussion of classical philosophy in this first section, emphasizing the influence of ideas, is meant to complement the discussion in Chapter 5, which treats classical works as literature; Lucretius is discussed in both places.
Conference papers on the topic "English fiction 18th century History and criticism"
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Макарьев, И. В. "Friedrich Schlegel's understanding of history in the context of the philosophy of history of the XX – early XXI centuries." In Современное социально-гуманитарное образование: векторы развития в год науки и технологий: материалы VI международной конференции (г. Москва, МПГУ, 22–23 апреля 2021 г.). Crossref, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.37492/etno.2021.83.19.061.
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в философии истории ХХ в. можно выделить двоякую тенденцию. С одной стороны, классическая философия истории подвергается радикальной критике (в немецкой философской герменевтике, французском структурализме и постструктурализме, англоязычной аналитической философии), а с другой стороны, она продолжается и развивается в различных концепциях и теориях («столкновение цивилизаций» С. Хантингтона, «конец истории» Ф. Фукуямы). Такая двойственность (критика философии истории и ее развитие) не является характеристикой только нашей современности. Выдающийся немецкий филолог и философ Фридрих Шлегель (1772–1829) в ситуации философской революции рубежа XVIII–XIX вв. постарался соединить эти две позиции в одну, что и стало предметом анализа автора статьи. in the philosophy of the history of the twentieth century, a twofold tendency can be distinguished. On the one hand, the classical philosophy of history is subjected to radical criticism (in German philosophical hermeneutics, French structuralism and poststructuralism, English-speaking analytical philosophy), and on the other hand, it continues and develops in various concepts and theories (S. Huntington's "clash of civilizations", "end of history" F. Fukuyama). Such duality (criticism of the philosophy of history and its development) is not a characteristic only of our modernity. The outstanding German philologist and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), in the situation of the philosophical revolution at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, tried to combine these two positions into one, , which became the subject of the analysis of the author of the article.