The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last

The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last
Author: Sarah Fielding
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0813148251

The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding's first and most celebrated novel, went through several editions, the second of which was heavily revised by her brother Henry. This edition includes Henry's "corrections" in an appendix. In recounting the guileless hero's search for a true friend, the novel depicts the derision with which almost everyone treats his sentimental attitudes to human nature. Acclaimed as an accurate portrait of mid-eighteenth-century London, The Adventures of David Simple sets forth some provocative feminist ideas. Also included is Fielding's much darker sequel, Volume the Last (1753).

The Adventures of David Simple ; And, The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last

The Adventures of David Simple ; And, The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last
Author: Sarah Fielding
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 524
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780140437478

The Adventures of David Simpleis the story of one man's search for truth, honesty, and friendship in a corrupt world. Following the literary model of Don Quixote, the novel is both a witty and engaging satire of eighteenth-century London life and a serious examination of the moral and social issues facing men and women of the day. Fielding draws upon her own experiences as an impoverished, unmarried gentlewoman to portray her two heroines, Cynthia and Camilla, and infuses the novel with provocative feminist ideas as she makes a pointed critique of the position of women. This Penguin Classics edition includes a critical introduction, suggestions for further reading, a chronology, notes, and a glossary. It also includes two appendixes: Henry Fielding's preface to the second edition and a note about the currency of eighteenth-century England. Edited with an introduction and notes by Linda Bree.

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Author: Kate Rumbold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316477894

The eighteenth century has long been acknowledged as a pivotal period in Shakespeare's reception, transforming a playwright requiring 'improvement' into a national poet whose every word was sacred. Scholars have examined the contribution of performances, adaptations, criticism and editing to this process of transformation, but the crucial role of fiction remains overlooked. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals for the first time the prevalence, and the importance, of fictional characters' direct quotations from Shakespeare. Quoting characters ascribe emotional and moral authority to Shakespeare, redeploy his theatricality, and mock banal uses of his words; by shaping in this way what is considered valuable about Shakespeare, the novel accrues new cultural authority of its own. Shakespeare underwrites, and is underwritten by, the eighteenth-century novel, and this book reveals the lasting implications for both of their reputations.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought
Author: Debra Taylor Bourdeau
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780874139754

Every ending marks a potential beginning; every act of reading is, in a very real sense an act of re-writing; and to revise is, literally, to re-see. These bits of conventional wisdom underlie the topic explored in this volume's collection of essays by literary critics who want to know more about the instinct to continue and the impulse to revise an existing text.

The Practice of Quixotism

The Practice of Quixotism
Author: S. Gordon
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2006-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230601537

Using postmodern theory, The Practice of Quixotism explores eighteenth-century women's texts that use quixote narratives, which typically demand that individuals purge their minds of internalized fictions to insist instead that the reality we encounter is inevitably mediated by the texts we have read.

Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Author: Temma Berg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611461421

This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives. Divided into three sections, “Living in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” “Living in the Eighteenth-Century World,” and “Afterlives,” the fourteen essays that form the body of the collection treat such topics as epistolarity, fraternal relations in novels and in families, women and travel in Jane Austen’s novels, the pleasures and challenges of searching through archives to understand the complex entanglements of eighteenth-century families, the changing reception of Alexander Pope’s poetry, and intersections among race, class, gender, and sexuality in a famous early-nineteenth-century Scottish libel case. The final essay of the fourteen connects the archetypal eighteenth-century figure of the seduced and abandoned woman to Sophie Calle’s 2007 Venice Biennale exhibition entitled Take Care of Yourself, which the author reads as a direct descendant of the eighteenth-century letter novel.The book is framed by an introduction that situates the book as part of the ongoing redefinition of the archive of eighteenth-century literature and an afterword that gives a personal account of Rizzo’s career and her indelible legacy as friend, mentor, and professional model. The contributors use a variety of methods in their scholarship, but a common strand is archival research and close reading inflected by feminist analysis. The book will appeal to students and scholars of eighteenth-century British literature and culture and to those interested in women’s writing and women’s relationships in the eighteenth century—and today—and in feminist literary history. The contributors to the volume practice the kind of scholarship Rizzo was known for—painstaking archival research and attention to the nuances of relationships among eighteenth-century women (and men)—and in so doing shed new light on a number of familiar and not-so-familiar eighteenth-century texts.

Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Author: Bryan Mangano
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319486950

This book explores the reciprocal influence of friendship ideals and narrative forms in eighteenth-century British fiction. It examines how various novelists, from Samuel Richardson to Mary Shelley, drew upon classical and early modern conceptions of true amity as a model of collaborative pedagogy. Analyzing authors, their professional circumstances, and their audiences, the study shows how the rhetoric of friendship became a means of paying deference to the increasing power of readerships, while it also served as a semi-covert means to persuade resistant readers and confront aesthetic and moral debates head on. The study contributes to an understanding of gender roles in the early history of the novel by disclosing the constant interplay between male and female models of amity. It demonstrates that this gendered dialogue shaped the way novelists imagined character interiority, reconciled with the commercial aspects of writing, and engaged mixed-sex audiences.

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment

New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment
Author: Brett C. McInelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2018-11-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1683931629

The Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical and cultural movement that swept through Western Europe, has often been characterized as a mostly secular phenomenon that ultimately undermined religious authority and belief, and eventually gave way to the secularization of Western society and to modernity. To whatever extent the Enlightenment can be credited with giving birth to modern Western culture, historians in more recent years have aptly demonstrated that the Enlightenment hardly singled the death knell of religion. Not only did religion continue to occupy a central pace in political, social, and private life throughout the eighteenth century, but it shaped the Enlightenment project itself in significant and meaningful ways. The thinkers and philosophers normally associated with the Enlightenment, to be sure, challenged state-sponsored church authority and what they perceived as superstitious forms of belief and practice, but they did not mount a campaign to undermine religion generally. A more productive approach to understanding religion in the age of Enlightenment, then, is to examine the ways the Enlightenment informed religious belief and practice during the period as well as the ways religion influenced the Enlightenment and to do so from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is the goal of this collection. The chapters document the intersections of religious and Enlightenment ideas in such areas as theology, the natural sciences, politics, the law, art, philosophy, and literature.

The Governess

The Governess
Author: Sarah Fielding
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2005-09-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781551114125

Published in 1749, the story of Mrs. Teachum and the nine pupils who make up her “little female academy” is widely recognized as the first full-length novel for children, and the first to be aimed specifically at girls. The daily experiences of Mrs. Teachum’s charges are interwoven with fables and fairy tales illustrating the book’s underlying principles, which draw on contemporary theories of education and virtue. As central to the history of the novel as it is to the development of children’s literature, The Governess is a pioneering work by one of the eighteenth century’s most respected women writers. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction that places The Governess in its cultural and literary context; appendices include examples of eighteenth-century educational literature and selections from Fielding’s correspondence.