The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period PDF Download

Author: William St Clair
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521810067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Author: William St Clair
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521699440
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
Most people believed that reading significantly influenced minds, attitudes, and actions during the centuries when printed paper was the only means by which texts could travel across time and distance. William St. Clair offers a very different picture of the past from those presented by traditional approaches through quantified information he provides on book prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships gathered from over fifty publishing and printing archives.

Author: William St. Clair
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Book industries and trade
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Allen Reddick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521568388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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This second edition of the acclaimed study of Johnson's Dictionary incorporates new commentary and scholarship.

Author: Anne Frey
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804773483
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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British State Romanticism contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of their late work as evidence of declining abilities. Frey argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model that adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.

Author: Mark Towsey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004348670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Before the Public Library explores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World in the two centuries before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century through essays by eighteen leading scholars.

Author: M. Tomko
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230300456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics not only preoccupied British politics but also informed the romantic period's most prominent literary works. This book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues.

Author: Tim Blanning
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0679605002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times “[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National Review From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a psychological force, and the use of dreamlike imagery. Whether unearthing the origins of “sex appeal” or the celebration of accessible storytelling, The Romantic Revolution is a bold and brilliant introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast its age. “Anyone with an interest in cultural history will revel in the book’s range and insights. Specialists will savor the anecdotes, casual readers will enjoy the introduction to rich and exciting material. Brilliant artistic output during a time of transformative upheaval never gets old, and this book shows us why.”—The Washington Times “It’s a pleasure to read a relatively concise piece of scholarship of so high a caliber, especially expressed as well as in this fine book.”—Library Journal

Author: Gary Kelly
Publisher: London : Longman
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 is the first comprehensive historical survey of fiction from that period for many decades. It combines a clear awareness of the period's social history with recent developments in literary criticism, theory and history, and explains the astounding variety of forms in Romantic fiction in terms of the various cultural, political, social, regional and gender conflicts of the time. It provides a broad-ranging survey from the major authors and works through to the sub-genres of the period. Jan Austin and Sir Alter Scott are discussed alongside the Gothic Romance, political and feminist fiction, social satire and regional, rural and historical novels. It also provides a comparison of the methods of distribution and marketing and the availability of books then and now; examines cheap popular fiction and children's fiction, and considers the recent debate about the place of prose fiction in a Romantic literature hitherto dominated by poetry.

Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.