Author: Graham MidgleyPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 348
Book Description
The Life of Orator Henley
Author: Graham MidgleyThe Life of Orator Henley
Author: Graham MidgleyThe Life of Mr Richard Savage
Author: Samuel JohnsonPublisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 177048602X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Book Description
The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane, charming, a brilliant conversationalist, but also irresponsible and impulsive. His role in a tavern brawl almost led him to the gallows, though his life was saved by an eleventh-hour pardon by the King. Over time he attracted many supporters, practically all of whom he managed to alienate by the time of his death in a debtors’ prison in Bristol. Johnson, who had been friends with Savage for a little over a year, drew on published documents and his own memories of Savage to produce one of the first great English biographies. The edition is supplemented by other writings by Johnson, a selection of Savage’s prose and verse, contemporary and posthumous responses to Savage and to Johnson’s biography, and selections by Johnson’s first two major biographers, Sir John Hawkins and James Boswell.
The Invention of the Oral
Author: Paula McDowellPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645701X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
Just as today’s embrace of the digital has sparked interest in the history of print culture, so in eighteenth-century Britain the dramatic proliferation of print gave rise to urgent efforts to historicize different media forms and to understand their unique powers. And so it was, Paula McDowell argues, that our modern concepts of oral culture and print culture began to crystallize, and authors and intellectuals drew on older theological notion of oral tradition to forge the modern secular notion of oral tradition that we know today. Drawing on an impressive array of sources including travel narratives, elocution manuals, theological writings, ballad collections, and legal records, McDowell re-creates a world in which everyone from fishwives to philosophers, clergymen to street hucksters, competed for space and audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and the street. She argues that the earliest positive efforts to theorize "oral tradition," and to depict popular oral culture as a culture (rather than a lack of culture), were prompted less by any protodemocratic impulse than by a profound discomfort with new cultures of reading, writing, and even speaking shaped by print. Challenging traditional models of oral versus literate societies and key assumptions about culture’s ties to the spoken and the written word, this landmark study reorients critical conversations across eighteenth-century studies, media and communications studies, the history of the book, and beyond.
The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture
Author: Paul GoringPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456768
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the burgeoning eighteenth-century fascination with the human body as an eloquent, expressive object. This wide-ranging study examines the role of the body within a number of cultural arenas - particularly oratory, the theatre and the novel - and charts the efforts of projectors and reformers who sought to exploit the textual potential of the body for the public assertion of modern politeness. Paul Goring shows how diverse writers and performers including David Garrick, James Fordyce, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding and Laurence Sterne were involved in the construction of new ideals of physical eloquence - bourgeois, sentimental ideals which stood in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Through innovative readings of fiction and contemporary manuals on acting and public speaking, Goring reveals the ways in which the human body was treated as an instrument for the display of sensibility and polite values.
Christopher Smart and Satire
Author: Min WildPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317166418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
Christopher Smart and Satire explores the lively and idiosyncratic world of satire in the eighteenth-century periodical, focusing on the way that writers adopted personae to engage with debates taking place during the British Enlightenment. Taking Christopher Smart's audacious and hitherto underexplored Midwife, or Old Woman's Magazine (1750-1753) as her primary source, Min Wild provides a rich examination of the prizewinning Cambridge poet's adoption of the bizarre, sardonic 'Mary Midnight' as his alter-ego. Her analysis provides insights into the difficult position in which eighteenth-century writers were placed, as ideas regarding the nature and functions of authorship were gradually being transformed. At the same time, Wild also demonstrates that Smart's use of 'Mary Midnight' is part of a tradition of learned wit, having an established history and characterized by identifiable satirical and rhetorical techniques. Wild's engagement with her exuberant source materials establishes the skill and ingenuity of Smart's often undervalued, multilayered prose satire. As she explores Smart's use of a peculiarly female voice, Wild offers us a picture of an ingenious and ribald wit whose satirical overview of society explores, overturns, and anatomises questions of gender, politics, and scientific and literary endeavors.
Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets
Author: Roger LonsdalePublisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191570745
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 2220
Book Description
Johnson himself wrote in 1782: 'I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets'. Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy. Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior, Swift, Pope, and Gray. The Lives also include Johnson's memorable biography of the enigmatic Richard Savage (1744), the friend of his own early years in London. Roger Lonsdale's Introduction describes the origins, composition, and textual history of the Lives, and assesses Johnson's assumptions and aims as biographer and critic. The commentary provides a detailed literary and historical context, investigating Johnson's sources, relating the Lives to his own earlier writings and conversation, and to the critical opinions of his contemporaries, as well as illustrating their early reception. This is the first scholarly edition since George Birkbeck Hill's three-volume Oxford edition (1905). This is volume three of four.
Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets
Author: Samuel JohnsonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199284814
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 484
Book Description
Samuel Johnson's last literary work, the Lives of the Poets, offers a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to Johnson's own time. Always recognized as a major contribution to English biography and criticism, it is also one of Johnson's most readable and eloquent achievements. This is the first scholarly edition since 1905 and includes a full introduction and critical apparatus. This is volume three of four.
The Great and Eccentric Characters of the World, Their Lives and Their Deeds, Representing All Ages and All Countries
Author: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams
Author: Henry FieldingPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192833433
Category : Clergy
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Book Description
'I beg as soon as you get Fielding's Joseph Andrews, I fear in Ridicule of your Pamela and of Virtue in the Notion of Don Quixote's Manner, you would send it to me by the very first Coach.' (George Cheyne in a letter to Samuel Richardson, February 1742) Both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Shamela (1741) were prompted by the success of Richardson's Pamela (1740), of which Shamela is a splendidly bawdy parody. But in Shamela Fielding also demonstrates his concern for the corruption of contemporary society, politics, religion, morality, and taste. Thesame themes - together with a presentation of love as charity, as friendship, and in its sexual taste - are present in Joseph Andrews, Fielding's first novel. It is a work of considerable literary sophistication and satirical verve, but its appeal lies also in its spirit of comic affirmation,epitomized in the celebrated character of Parson Adams. This revised and expanded edition follows the text of Joseph Andrews established by Martin C. Battestin for the definitive Wesleyan Edition of Fielding's works. The text of Shamela is based on the first edition, and two substantial appendices reprint the preliminary matter from Conyers Middleton'sLife of Cicero and the second edition of Richardson's Pamela (both closely parodied in Shamela). A new introduction by Thomas Keymer situates Fielding's works in their critical and historical contexts.