Eighteenth-Century literature

'Horace Walpole, Leland and Clara Reeve: Anglo-Saxon Histories and the Eighteenth-century Whig Historical Novel', conference paper, BSECS 2009

by Fiona Price

A longer and more detailed version of this paper is available as “‘Ancient Liberties’: Rewriting the Historical Novel: Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole, and Clara Reeve.” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2011): 19-38.

Abstract: Taking Walter Scott’s novels as paradigmatic, Georg Lukács defines the historical novel as a genre that... more Abstract: Taking Walter Scott’s novels as paradigmatic, Georg Lukács defines the historical novel as a genre that figures history as abrupt change or progress, a theory which, this essay argues, fails to allow for the alternative political fictions available in eighteenth-century Britain. When the impact of the Glorious Revolution on the fictions of Leland, Walpole and Reeve is acknowledged, it becomes evident that the notion of inherited liberties was as important to Whig thinkers as the narrative of historical progress. This realisation allows fuller understanding of how these ‘gothic’ works function as historical novels.

Eyes Wide Shut: Diderot's Le Rêve de d'Alembert

by Kate Tunstall

in James Fowler, New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge, 2011)

"The Novel and the Machine in the Eighteenth Century"

by Joseph Drury

Published in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction" 42: 2 (2009)

The dynamic structural model for the erotics of narrative in the eighteenth century was l’homme machine of French... more The dynamic structural model for the erotics of narrative in the eighteenth century was l’homme machine of French philosopher Julien de la Mettrie. Set in this context, the narrative digressions symbolized by Corporal Trim’s arabesque in Tristram Shandy do not exemplify narrative desire, as Peter Brooks argued in Reading for the Plot, so much as frustrate it. A close reading of Tristram Shandy shows that Sterne intended his novel to resist what he saw as a series of related mid-eighteenth-century cultural developments: a paradigm shift towards using mechanical philosophy in science, the disciplining of the body in order to maximize production and reproduction, and the increasing popularity of novel reading. Sterne’s novel features stopped clocks, broken machines and stories that, despite titillating beginnings, fail to satisfy the concupiscence of readers who turn the pages only to get to the end. The coach whose stages are compared to the breaks between chapters in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews becomes in Sterne’s text the speeding post chaise, a new technology in the mid-eighteenth century, which carries Tristram in his flight from death in Volume VII. Just as the accident that shatters Tristram’s post-chaise allows him to discover the ancient pleasures of mule-travel, so the disruption of narrative is designed to awaken readers to the polymorphous pleasures of older, slower kinds of reading, now facing eclipse in the age of the novel.

"Haywood's Thinking Machines"

by Joseph Drury

Published in "Eighteenth-Century Fiction" 21: 2 (Winter 2008-9)

Eliza Haywood’s representation of consciousness in her early fiction addresses eighteenth-century uncertainties about... more Eliza Haywood’s representation of consciousness in her early fiction addresses eighteenth-century uncertainties about the nature of human agency in a world newly understood as mechanical that are central to the formal development of the novel. In Love in Excess, the deliberative resistance that Melliora uses to reform the predatory Count D’Elmont, a libertine who claims to be unable to control his desire, also enacts a critique of the libertinism of the heroic romance, which was attacked for mechanically stimulating the passions of the reader. Although critics argue that the mechanistic eroticism of Haywood’s characters undermines her claims to moral seriousness, mechanism is not necessarily incompatible with morality. Like the materialist philosophers of her generation, Haywood believes that it is not freedom from causal determinism but the capacity to deliberate on conflicting causes that makes an agent moral. In her depiction of the passionate but vacillating Melliora, Haywood aims to show how romances might also be capable of moral instruction.

Imperative Sentences in Ten Eighteenth-Century English Comedies

by Ayumi Nonomiya

published in 'Studies in Modern English' 27 (2011), the journal of Modern English Association, Japan.

The present study deals with imperative sentences in ten plays of eighteenth century England. Among negative... more The present study deals with imperative sentences in ten plays of eighteenth century England. Among negative imperatives, the contracted do-imperative ‘don’t V’ was by far the most frequently attested in my corpus while the uncontracted form ‘do not V’ seems to be associated with polite people and speech.
When we turn to affirmative imperatives, it could be suggested that the type of imperative with a pronoun, ‘you V’, began to take the place of ‘V you’, which was the dominant type in Early Modern English. The other finding is that when a social
inferior speaks to his or her superior the type ‘do V’ may be preferred while when
the superior talks to the inferior the type ‘do you V’ tends to be employed. This phenomenon could be a form of politeness.
The courtesy marker please was never attested in my corpus while pray was found sparingly. While most of the occurrences are directed to upper-class characters, pray is used by an upper-class character to a lower-class character when they are
complete strangers or on very intimate terms.

Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century,ed. by Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs

by Helen Brooks

Women's Writing, May 2012

Reading through Desire: Interpretive Practices for Eighteenth‐Century Popular Culture

by Sally O'Driscoll

The Lesbian and the Passionless Woman: Femininity and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England

by Sally O'Driscoll

Lesbian Criticism and Feminist Criticism: Readings of" Millenium Hall"

by Sally O'Driscoll

Queerness, Class, and Sexuality.'

by Sally O'Driscoll

Outlaw readings: beyond queer theory

by Sally O'Driscoll

John Rich as Critic: The Evidence of “Some Remarks on the Tragedy Call’d Agis”

by Kevin J. McGinley

In John Rich and the Eighteenth Century London Stage: Electronic Proceedings (September, 2011).

John Rich

by Kevin J. McGinley

Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 July 2011

'An Intelligent Foreigner'?: The English Reception of Karl Ludwig von Pöllnitz in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

by Madeleine Brook

published in 'ANGERMION: Jahrbuch für britisch-deutsche Kulturbeziehungen' 2 (2009)

A Newly Identified Holograph Manuscript by John Rich: 'Some Remarks on the Tragedy Call'd Agis' (1754)

by Kevin J. McGinley

Review of English Studies 59 (2008), 409-25

‘My Name is Norval?’: The Revision of Character Names in John Home's Douglas

by Kevin J. McGinley

Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 35:1 (2012), 67-83

The First Edinburgh and London Editions of John Home's Douglas and the Play's Early Stage History

by Kevin J. McGinley

Theatre Notebook 60:3 (2006) , 134-146 .

'Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable': The Representation of Female Community and its Effects on Periodical and Reader Identity in the Early Issues of Joseph Addison's The Free-Holder

by Adam James Smith

Published in 'Track Changes: The Postgraduate Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities' (University of Sheffield)

'Issue 2, Winter 2011: Connected Communities'

http://trackchanges.group.shef.ac.uk/content/Issue%202,%20Winter%202011.html

The portrayal of female communities within Joseph Addison’s early Eighteenth-Century periodical, The Free-Holder, is... more The portrayal of female communities within Joseph Addison’s early Eighteenth-Century periodical, The Free-Holder, is currently an understudied feature of his journalism which this artcle will argue offers an as yet unrealised illumination on Addison’s conceptualisation of community and his broader social project as a whole.1 It will demonstrate this through close analysis of the fourth and eight Issues of The Free-Holder, which will be seen to paint a picture of both female community and the imagined community of its returning readership.

‘A Letter from John Partridge to Isaac Manley 24 April 1708: Provenance and Authenticity’ Notes and Queries (published online March 24 2012 doi:10.1093/notesj/gjs045)

by John McTague

On the Doctor and the Clockmaker: the Satire of the Classical Epigraph through Samuel Johnson and T. C. Haliburton (TAL 21.1)

by Duncan McFarlane

McFarlane, Duncan. "On the Doctor and the Clockmaker: The Satire of the Classical Epigraph through Samuel Johnson and T. C. Haliburton." Translation & Literature 21.1 (2012): 1-20.