Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 articles from June 1997

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 archives from June 1997

Class, authorship and the social intertexture of genre in Restoration theater.
June 22, 1997... In recent ideological approaches to Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, genre is defined consistently as a sociopolitical construct with overt class associations rather than as an exclusively literary or formal institution. Mikhail...

Margaret Cavendish and the female satirist. (English woman author)
June 22, 1997... Among early modern women writers who have been "rediscovered" in the last decade or so, Margaret Cavendish has attracted heightened critical attention, especially for the apparent contradictions in her self-presentations as royalist and feminist,...

Power, gender, and identity in Apra Behn's "The Disappointment." (17th-century poem by woman author)
June 22, 1997... For at least the past thirty years - since Richard Quaintance first identified the "imperfect enjoyment poem" as a distinct critical category - Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" (1680) has been read (rightly) within the context of this small body...

The Puritan origins of Gulliver's conversion in Houyhnhnmland. (character in author Jonathan Swift's book 'Gulliver's Travels')
June 22, 1997... In the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift develops a complex satire of radical Protestantism. A careful examination of the language Gulliver uses to describe his experience in "The Voyage to Houyhnhmland" reveals his identification...

Precept, property, and "bourgeois" practice in 'Joseph Andrews.' (book by Henry Fielding)
June 22, 1997... One of Henry Fielding's clear designs in Joseph Andrews (1742) involves retooling the artistic machinery of the novel to yield a determinate morality unprecedented in the genre.(1) To that end he makes a conscious effort to replace the squeaky...

Fielding's mousetrap: Hamlet, Partridge, and the '45. (a character, a Shakespearean play and portrayal of events in the UK in 1745 that are featured in author Henry Fielding's book 'The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling')
June 22, 1997... If we follow those scholars who have mapped the plot of Tom Jones onto a calendar, then it is on a night very close to the winter solstice of 1745 that Tom, Partridge, Mrs. Miller, and her younger daughter attend a performance of Hamlet, with...

The miniature as reduction and talisman in Fielding's 'Amelia.'
June 22, 1997... In eighteenth-century England, portrait miniatures were the most popularly accessible way of representing the absent, beloved "other." This is true because of their relative affordability when compared to other forms of portraiture, and...

Reading reform in Richardson's 'Clarissa.' (novel 'Clarissa, Or The History of A Young Lady' by author Samuel Richardson)
June 22, 1997... A Wife at any time/Marriage will be always in my power... When I reform I'll marry. Every-body said you were brave: Every-body said you were generous. A brave man, I thought, could not be a base man: A generous man could...

Sentimental misogyny and medicine in 'Humphry Clinker.' (English author Tobias George Smollett's 18th-century novel 'The Expedition of Humphry Clinker')
June 22, 1997... On one level, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) presents its readers with a cast of scraggly, wryly drawn "originals" roaming Britain, including the tatterdemalion Humphry Clinker himself, the quixotic Obadiah Lismahago, and the...

Recent studies in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature.
June 22, 1997... It has become commonplace for authors of this annual essayreview to bemoan the lack of coherence among the hundred or so books that cross their desks, even when they plan to conclude their essays by assuring their readers that such dialogic...

Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel.
June 22, 1997... The most ambitious of these works may be James Thompson's Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Thompson reads several canonical novelists of the eighteenth century to counter the tendency of previous literary...

Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe.
June 22, 1997... Sandra Sherman's study, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century, aptly subtitled Accounting for Defoe explores the implications of that pun by investigating the ways in which "an infinite regress of fictionality [becomes] the sum...

Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994.
June 22, 1997... For Patrick Brantlinger in Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994, the "financial abyss" (p. 21) of unending debt becomes the Lacanian symptom of the modern nation-state, the absence or fiction which structures the public...

Literary Patronage in England: 1650-1800.
June 22, 1997... Dustin Griffin's Literary Patronage in England, 1650-1800 might be read in conjunction with these works on economics because it explores boldly and intelligently the complex relationships among various forms of monetary reward and symbolic...

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World.
June 22, 1997... The challenges posed by Thompson, Sherman, Brantlinger, and Griffin to the master-narratives of economic progress in the eighteenth century extend beyond debates about credit or the novel to what Griffin terms the "central tenets" of whiggish and...

Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry.
June 22, 1997... One exception to this rule is John Goodridge's Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, an unassuming but valuable study that reads poems by Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, James Thomson, and John Dyer within and against the traditions of labor and...

The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe: 1790-1920.
June 22, 1997... The prominence of the new economic criticism as a template for interpreting the rise of the novel may help explain critics' continuing fascination with Defoe. In addition to Sherman's study, several monographs appeared last year that attest to...

Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses.
June 22, 1997... Less valuable is the collection Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, the revised proceedings of a conference held in 1993, edited by Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson. A third of the essays deal with Defoe's novel, the others with various...

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
June 22, 1997... There are - there always are - studies which offer revisionist interpretations of the accepted narratives of the rise of the novel. The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti, provides an excellent...

Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters.
June 22, 1997... Among recent studies of the novel form, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters deserves to take its place on bookshelves next to Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction...

Desire and Domestic Fiction.
June 22, 1997... Among recent studies of the novel form, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters deserves to take its place on bookshelves next to Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction...

Before Novels.
June 22, 1997... Among recent studies of the novel form, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters deserves to take its place on bookshelves next to Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction...

The True Story of the Novel.
June 22, 1997... In The True Story of the Novel, a book which has received a lot of attention in the commercial press, Margaret Anne Doody sets for herself the herculean task of tracking the course of the novel for two thousand years. In many respects, her study...

The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel.
June 22, 1997... A different view of history and fiction structures Everett Zimmerman's The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel, a careful study of the eighteenth-century novel's efforts to police the boundaries between...

New Essays on Samuel Richardson.
June 22, 1997... The collection edited by Albert J. Rivero, New Essays on Samuel Richardson, with one notable exception tiptoes softly around the implications of "new." Most of the contributors, Howard Weinbrot and John Dussinger among them, offer text-based...

Laurence Stern Revisited.
June 22, 1997... Elizabeth Kraft's Laurence Sterne Revisited, thirty years after the initial Twayne volume by William Bowman Piper, invokes newer forms of cultural criticism as well as formalist discussions of the 1960s and 1970s. Emphasizing the continuity...

The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers.
June 22, 1997... Books, their readers, reviewers, and publishers are the subject of several valuable monographs and articles that focus wholly or in part on material culture between 1660 and 1800. Frank Donoghue's study of literary reviewing in the mid-eighteenth...

Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies.
June 22, 1997... Barbara M. Benedict, in Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies, casts a wider net than Donoghue by exploring the development of literary anthologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a...

The Practice and Representation of Reading In England.
June 22, 1997... Along somewhat similar lines, James Raven's essay on eighteenth-century libraries in the collection co-edited with Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, discusses both circulating and domestic...

The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print.
June 22, 1997... Harry M. Solomon's The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print is the first biography since 1910 of the footman turned poet, playwright, satirist, bookseller, and publisher. In tracing the rise of Dodsley from plebeian poet to the...

Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property.
June 22, 1997... Laura J. Rosenthal's Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property draws adroitly on recent scholarship on literary property as well as on the drama to examine the relationships between changing...

The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century.
June 22, 1997... The drama itself received comparatively little attention last year. The most notable work picks up where, two decades ago, Robert Hume's exhaustive study, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, left off. In English...

English Drama: 1660-1700.
June 22, 1997... The drama itself received comparatively little attention last year. The most notable work picks up where, two decades ago, Robert Hume's exhaustive study, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, left off. In English...

Sheridan Studies.
June 22, 1997... The collection Sheridan Studies, edited by James Morwood and David Crane, is probably more useful for its historical discussions than its critical views. Mark Auburn provides a good overview of the theater of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's era and...

The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760.
June 22, 1997... It would be misleading to cordon off some studies as "feminist" in an age in which many of the crucial modes of analysis owe their rhetorical force, intellectual integrity, and political acumen to the discourses of feminism. Quite obviously, the...

Works of Aphra Behn, vols. 5 - 7.
June 22, 1997... Janet Todd has contributed significantly, if not heroically, to Behn studies during the year, editing volumes five, six, and seven of the Works of Aphra Behn, so that now all of Behn's plays are available in a standard modern edition. If these...

Aphra Behn Studies.
June 22, 1997... Janet Todd has contributed significantly, if not heroically, to Behn studies during the year, editing volumes five, six, and seven of the Works of Aphra Behn, so that now all of Behn's plays are available in a standard modern edition. If these...

Charlotte Smith.
June 22, 1997... Carroll L. Fry's study, Charlotte Smith, is astute, and unpretentious. It paints a chilling portrait of the novelist's marriage to a profligate husband, from whom she separated after having ten children, and offers a succinct discussion of her...

The World of Hannah More.
June 22, 1997... Patricia Demers sets out to rescue Hannah More from the hostility of her recent feminist critics by arguing for the significance of the writer's melioristic philosophy as a means to galvanize middle- and upper-class women to dispense charity to...

Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753-1806.
June 22, 1997... A different view of Yearsley, as one might expect, is offered by Mary Waldron, who nonetheless distances her literary biography from marxist, feminist, and new historicist approaches by arguing that the poet "defied expectation by refusing to...

Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture.
June 22, 1997... In some respects, Waldron's approach to Yearsley seems indicative of the recent turn toward what its proponents have called the "new formalism," an approach that works its way through the theoretical and political criticism of the 1980s, or...

The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740.
June 22, 1997... Jayne Elizabeth's Lewis's study of the fable in British literary culture from John Ogilby to Samuel Richardson, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740, attributes the popularity of numerous translations and redactions of Aesop...

Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm From the Ranters to Christopher Smart.
June 22, 1997... A focus on literary form, however, does not mean a rejection of broader cultural models, and successful studies often stretch our understanding of the implications of both literature and the conventions and expectations that it continually...

The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style.
June 22, 1997... The critical fascination with sensibility, and sentimentality, is well into its second decade, and the titles of two works - Jerome McGann's The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style and Markman Ellis's The Politics of...

The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel.
June 22, 1997... The critical fascination with sensibility, and sentimentality, is well into its second decade, and the titles of two works - Jerome McGann's The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style and Markman Ellis's The Politics of...

The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660-1750.
June 22, 1997... If sentimentality sometimes seems the cry for a mawkish soul in a soulless age, there is a good deal of valuable work being done in the intellectual history of the eighteenth century that calls into question our culture's romantic predisposition...

Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy.
June 22, 1997... William Walker's Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy is an ambitious effort to reread the intellectual archaeologies of Enlightenment thought and Romanticism. Walker challenges conventional views of eighteenth-century empiricism that reduce...

Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860.
June 22, 1997... Ann B. Shteir's Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860 is one of the few cross-disciplinary studies published during the last year to challenge the ahistorical divide between the humanities and...

Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785.
June 22, 1997... Stuart Sherman's Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 offers sustained and often provocative meditations on "a new experience of time" (p. 4) ushered in by the development of clocks with minute hands and, more...

Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas.
June 22, 1997... Neil Rennie's Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas begins by making the fascinating point that travelers to the South Seas found themselves "discovering not a new land so much as a location for old, nostalgic...

Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature.
June 22, 1997... Nicholas K. Robinson's study of contemporary cartoons and caricatures of Edmund Burke offers a wealth of historical information as well as two hundred and fifty illustrations, including fifty color plates. This volume Edmund Burke: A Life in...

Turner in the North.
June 22, 1997... Last year Yale published several handsome volumes that seem designed to appeal to collectors of coffee table books as much as to scholars. These books come at what we must now account as bargain prices and provide much sound scholarship as well...

Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.
June 22, 1997... Last year Yale published several handsome volumes that seem designed to appeal to collectors of coffee table books as much as to scholars. These books come at what we must now account as bargain prices and provide much sound scholarship as well...

Venice and the Grand Tour.
June 22, 1997... In Venice and the Grand Tour, Bruce Redford examines the pedagogical, social, and sexual implications of Venice as a symbolic locus of English gentlemen's aspirations to an ideal of cultural refinement. As the object of this desire, however,...

Tradition in Transition.
June 22, 1997... Given the development of eighteenth-century studies over the last two decades, there is still comparatively little attention paid to the time and effort that most of us devote to teaching the literature of the period. The prices of scholarly...

Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century.
June 22, 1997... Notable among recent editions that significantly broaden our conceptions of eighteenth-century literature is Vincent Caretta's anthology of Afro-British authors, Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the...

Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
June 22, 1997... More expensive but perhaps no less valuable is David C. Sutton's Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, a comprehensive guide that directs readers and casual browsers to well-known and...