Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from June 1995

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from June 1995

"Modern panegyrick" and Defoe's "Dunciad." (poet Daniel Defoe)
June 22, 1995... When John Dryden in Mac Flecknoe ridiculed Thomas Shadwell with the lines "Thy Tragick Muse gives smiles, thy Comick sleep . . . Thy inoffensive satyrs never bite,"(1) he did not include a literary disaster which would, decades later, become the...

Convention and consciousness in Prior's love lyrics. (poet Matthew Prior)
June 22, 1995... Critics have always had a difficult time "placing" Matthew Prior's achievement, but, in general, they have chosen to see him as the tail end of the seventeenth-century tradition of love poetry. In his famous essay, "The Metaphysical Poets," T. S....

Swift's Struldbruggs, progress, and the analogy of history.
June 22, 1995... Like its subject, criticism of the Struldbrugg episode in book 3 of Gulliver's Travels has led a long but relatively uneventful life, much of it in unproductive isolation from its surroundings. Although generally praised as the emotional climax...

Fanny Hill's mapping of sexuality, female identity, and maternity. (discussion on Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland)
June 22, 1995... The eighteenth-century British were not only remapping world territories, but were also involved at home in the concomitant remapping of conceptual space to suit the new world of bourgeois capitalism. Through three related language patterns,...

Radical letters and male genealogies in Johnson's 'Dictionary.' (Samuel Johnson)
June 22, 1995... "I knew very well what I was undertaking - and very well how to do it - and I have done it very well."(1) Thus Samuel Johnson, in a rare moment of satisfaction, remarked with parental fondness on the lexicographic venture that had so vexed him...

The insufficiency, success, and significance of natural history.
June 22, 1995... In chapter 5 of Samuel Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), the hero feels trapped in the Happy Valley: "He discerned the various instincts of animals, and properties of plants, and found the place replete with wonders, of...

Sarah Scott's 'Millenium Hall' and female philanthropy.
June 22, 1995... In 1766 Newton Ogle, Deputy Clerk of the Closet to His Majesty George III, summarized the achievements of mid-eighteenth-century English philanthropists in a charity sermon delivered before the assembled governors of the Magdalen Charity: "Houses...

A house divided: Sarah Scott's 'Millenium Hall.'
June 22, 1995... Jane Spencer has wryly observed that "It seems . . . women needed a good deal of educating into their 'inborn,' 'natural' feminine qualities [during the eighteenth century], for the 'conduct-book' or 'courtesy-book' for women proliferated."(1)...

Cowper's 'Task' and the writing of a poet's salvation. (discussion of The Task by William Cowper)
June 22, 1995... I In the summer of 1764, while a patient at St. Albans Asylum for the Insane, William Cowper underwent a conversion to Calvinist Evangelicalism. During an intense bout of paranoia and self-contempt, he found a faith to save him from despair, a...

Recent studies in restoration and eighteenth century. (books on the 18th century)
June 22, 1995... Since most readers of this review teach or plan to teach literature, let us begin with the books from the past year likeliest to have an immediate effect on how we conduct our daily work. Canon wars are often conducted in an atmosphere of Laputan...