Synopses & Reviews
Taking 1970 as his starting point, Leopold Damrosch, Jr. has assembled in one volume the finest and most useful essays on eighteenth-century literature. Covering all the major authors of the period and using a wide variety of scholarly and theoretical approaches, the selections are balanced between wide-ranging studies and interpretations of particular texts, such as
Tom Jones,
Gulliver's Travels,
Clarissa,
Robinson Crusoe,
Tristram Shandy, and Boswell's
Life of Johnson. Elegantly written by such distinguished scholars as C.J. Rawson, Irvin Ethrenpreis, Ronald Paulson, John J. Richetti, Leo Braudy, Lawrence Lipking, and Patricia Meyer Spacks, these articles will be entertaining as well as thought-provoking to specialists and non-specialists alike.
Contributors: John Traugott, C. J. Rawson, William K. Wimsatt, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Howard Erskine-Hill, Ian Donaldson, Michael McKeon, Ronald Paulson, John Richetti, G. A. Starr, Leo Braudy, John Preston, Michael Rosenblum, Richard A. Lanham, Lawrence Lipking, William C. Dowling, Gillian Beer, John Sitter, Marshall Brown, Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Synopsis
Leopold Damrosch Jr. has assembled in one volume the finest and most useful essays on eighteenth-century literature. Covering all the major authors of the period and using a wide variety of scholarly and theoretical approaches, the selections are balanced between wide-ranging studies and interpretations of particular texts, such as Tom Jones, Gulliver's Travels, Clarissa, Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, and Boswell's Life of Johnson. Elegantly written by such distinguished scholars as C.J. Rawson, Irvin Ethrenpreis, Ronald Paulson, John J. Richetti, Leo Braudy, Lawrence Lipking, and Patricia Meyer Spacks, these articles will be entertaining as well as thought-provoking to specialists and non-specialists alike.
Table of Contents
JOHN TRAUGOTT: A Tale of a Tub
C.J. RAWSON: Gulliver and the Gentle Reader
WILLIAM K. WIMSATT: Rhetoric and Poems: The Example of Swift
IRVIN EHRENPREIS: Pope: Bipolar Implication
HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL: Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time
IAN DONALDSON: "A Double Capacity:" The Beggar's Opera
MICHAEL MCKEON: Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel
RONALD PAULSON: Life as Pilgrimage and as Theater
JOHN J. RICHETTI: Robinson Crusoe: The Self as Master
G.A. STARR: Defoe's Prose Style: The Language of Interpretation
LEO BRAUDY: Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa
JOHN PRESTON: Tom Jones: Irony and Judgment
MICHAEL ROSENBLUM: Smollett and the Old Conventions
RICHARD A. LANHAM: Pastoral War in Tristram Shandy
LAWRENCE LIPKING: Learning to Read Johnson: The Vision of Theodore and The Vanity of Human Wishes
WILLIAM C. DOWLING: Structure and Absence in Boswell's Life of Johnson
GILLIAN BEER: "Our unnatural No-voice": The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women's Gothic
JOHN SITTER: The Flight from History in Mid-Century Poetry
MARSHALL BROWN: The Urbane Sublime
PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS: Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney