James Thomson's The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–1842

James Thomson's The Seasons, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–1842
Author: Sandro Jung
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2015-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611461928

Drawing on the methods of textual and reception studies, book history, print culture research, and visual culture, this interdisciplinary study of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) understands the text as marketable commodity and symbolic capital which throughout its extended affective presence in the marketplace for printed literary editions shaped reading habits. At the same time, through the addition of paratexts such as memoirs of Thomson, notes, and illustrations, it was recast by changing readerships, consumer fashions, and ideologies of culture. The book investigates the poem’s cultural afterlife by charting the prominent place it occupied in the visual cultures of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While the emphasis of the chapters is on printed visual culture in the form of book illustrations, the book also features discussions of paintings and other visual media such as furniture prints. Reading illustrations of iconographic moments from The Seasons as paratextual, interpretive commentaries that reflect multifarious reading practices as well as mentalities, the chapters contextualise the editions in light of their production and interpretive inscription. They introduce these editions’ publishers and designers who conceived visual translations of the text, as well as the engravers who rendered these designs in the form of the engraving plate from which the illustration could then be printed. Where relevant, the chapters introduce non-British illustrated editions to demonstrate in which ways foreign booksellers were conscious of British editions of The Seasons and negotiated their illustrative models in the sets of engraved plates they commissioned for their volumes.

The Daring Muse

The Daring Muse
Author: Margaret Anne Doody
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1985-07-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521277235

The Daring Muse is a challenging account of the richness and complexity of Augustan poetry. It takes in a broad range of writers from the Restoration to the Regency, from Rochester and Dryden to Cowper and Crabbe, and shows the essential connections between them. Augustan poetry has too often been thought of as uniform, staidly classical, even dull. Margaret Doody explodes this myth once and for all. She shows it to be poetry of great energy and diversity: of extravagant conceits, subversive parody, incessant stylistic and formal experimentation; a self-consciously innovative poetry that sought to express and extend the perpetual, restless activity of the human mind. Both the principles and techniques of the verse are related to similar elements in the novels of the period; the book's numerous illustrations help to show how the poems were presented and interpreted in their own time.

Catalogue

Catalogue
Author: Bernard Quaritch (Firm)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1028
Release: 1907
Genre: Antiquarian booksellers
ISBN:

Sale Catalogues

Sale Catalogues
Author: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries (Firm)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1926
Genre:
ISBN: