Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from June 1994

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from June 1994

Royalism and honor in Aphra Behn's 'Oroonoko.'
June 22, 1994... Apart from the longstanding argument about its historical authenticity, criticism of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) has tended to focus on the novella's treatment of slavery and race, specifically on the ideological significance...

"The deep reserves of man": anxiety in Vanbrugh's 'The Relapse.' (John Vanbrugh)
June 22, 1994... One of Vanbrugh's attractions for the modern reader is that he is an enlightened writer who problematizes the ideal of female continence and queries the fairness of the Restoration double standard of sexual morality. All his plays take a critical...

Arguments to the self in Defoe's 'Roxana.' (Daniel Defoe)
June 22, 1994... Readers of Defoe's Roxana tend to see it as different, in degree if not in kind, from the author's other works of prose fiction. "Roxana," says David Blewett, "is Defoe's darkest novel. . . . Roxana is Defoe's only protagonist who is passive in...

Spectator 495: Addison and "the race of people called Jews." (Joseph Addison)
June 22, 1994... In the Spectator of 27 September 1712, Joseph Addison turned citizen of the world to focus his attention on "the Race of People called Jews."(1) It was not the first time that Jews had caught his attention, since scattered references appear in...

Collins, Thomson, and the Whig progress of liberty. (William Collins; James Thomson; Whig Party)
June 22, 1994... Liberty, James Thomson's nearly 3500-line blank verse "poetical vision" that recounts the Whiggish progress of European civilization and the triumphs of British freedom, has been almost unanimously viewed as one of his greatest aesthetic...

Virtue rarely rewarded: ideological subversion and narrative form in Haywood's later fiction. (Eliza Haywood)
June 22, 1994... Thus were the virtues of our heroine (those follies that had defaced them being fully corrected) at length rewarded with a happiness retarded only till she had rendered herself wholly worthy of receiving it.(1) By concluding The History of Miss...

Using "femalities" to "make fine men": Richardson's 'Sir Charles Grandison' and the feminization of narrative. (Samuel Richardson)
June 22, 1994... Samuel Richardson's active, "to the moment" correspondence with a circle of admiring readers is familiar to students of the eighteenth-century novel. As early as the first proofs of Clarissa, his notion of the novelistic text and the...

"Meaner themes": mock-heroic and providentialism in Cowper's poetry. (William Cowper)
June 22, 1994... I William Cowper's poetry has traditionally been seen in two opposite ways: either as a late relic of English Augustanism or as a harbinger of a newer romantic aesthetic.(1) This ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in his handling of one...

Sexual politics in Elizabeth Inchbald.
June 22, 1994... Of Elizabeth Inchbald's collection of biographical and critical prefaces to popular plays, her near-contemporary biographer James Boaden wrote: "There is something unfeminine . . . in a lady's placing herself in the seat of judgment."(1) Merely...

Recent studies in the Restoration and eighteenth century.
June 22, 1994... the poetry and poetical careers of James MacPherson, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth. "By delineating with particularity the sorts of pressure that result in poetry in these lives," Murphy attempts to "return...