Textual Studies And The Enlarged Eighteenth Century

Textual Studies and the Enlarged Eighteenth Century scrutinizes the culture and sometimes the cult of electronic and other technology-assisted scholarship with respect to eighteenth-century studies.

During his forty-two years as president of AMS Press, Gabriel Hornstein quietly sponsored and stimulated the revival of “long” eighteenth-century studies. Whether by reanimating long-running research publications; by creating scholarly journals; or by converting daring ideas into lauded books, “Gabe” initiated a golden age of Enlightenment scholarship. This understated publishing magnate created a global audience for a research specialty that many scholars dismissed as antiquarianism. Paper, Ink, and Achievement finds in the career of this impresario a vantage point on the modern study of the Enlightenment. An introduction discusses Hornstein’s life and achievements, revealing the breadth of his influence on our understanding of the early days of modernity. Three sets of essays open perspectives on the business of long-eighteenth-century studies: on the role of publishers, printers, and bibliophiles in manufacturing cultural legacies; on authors whose standing has been made or eclipsed by the book culture; and on literary modes that have defined, delimited, or directed Enlightenment studies. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Short stories, as this anthology demonstrates, can help just as much, if not more, than novels and poems, to get a sense of the 18th century. They feature the same adventures of the body, the mind, or the soul that one finds in Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or Tristram Shandy. The first collection of its kind: forty-seven 18th-century British short stories, some of which have never before been anthologized, in an annotated and illustrated edition.

Citizens of the World investigates an area of eighteenth-century cultural, intellectual, and day-to-day life that many have seen but few have explored: adaptation. Throughout the long eighteenth century, adaptation happened repeatedly and in diverse forms: in the experience of travelers, merchants, and expatriates who made their way in foreign lands; in the adjustment of ancient literary norms to modern themes, concerns, and expectations; in the development of scientific apparatus for the probing of newly-discovered phenomena; in translating; in the adjusting of familiar architecture for new environments; in speculating about and making provision for the future reception of contemporary works; in the tempering and symphonizing of musical instruments; and in dozens of other no less important ways. The eight essays in this book, composed by scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, provide the first panoramic view of adaptation during the Enlightenment. Essays delve into such diverse forms of adaptation as the representation of cultural interchange on porcelain serving pieces; the attempt to come to terms with the demands of air travel through the often cumbersome technology of ballooning; the relevance of the English Enlightenment to present-day Caribbean literature; piracy as a form of recalibration; Vietnamese verse; Georgic envisioning of ecological stability; and the uncanny interactions of French provincial architecture with both eighteenth-century dwellers and their descendants. Cumulatively, the essays illuminate the process by which eighteenth-century thinkers, artists, and adventurers elevated adaptation from a mere necessity to a stimulating, happily unending cultural project.

Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersections of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Contributors take up other topics significant to the field, including post-feminism, travel, and seismology. Whether discussing cultural exchange or textual reciprocities, each piece extends the theme, building on the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings. Rounding out this collection are tributes from Clingham’s former students and colleagues, including original poetry.

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This volume covers the period 1645-1714, and removes the traditional literary period labels and boundaries used in earlier studies to categorize the literary culture of late seventeenth-century England. It invites readers to explore the continuities and the literary innovations occurring during six turbulent decades, as English readers and writers lived through unprecedented events including a King tried and executed by Parliament and another exiled, the creation of the national entity 'Great Britain', and an expanding English awareness of the New World as well as encounters with the cultures of Asia and the subcontinent. The period saw the establishment of new concepts of authorship and it saw a dramatic increase of women working as professional, commercial writers. London theatres closed by law in 1642 reopened with new forms of entertainments from musical theatrical spectaculars to contemporary comedies of manners with celebrity actors and actresses. Emerging literary forms such as epistolary fictions and topical essays were circulated and promoted by new media including newspapers, periodical publications, and advertising and laws were changing governing censorship and taking the initial steps in the development of copyright. It was a period which produced some of the most profound and influential literary expressions of religious faith from John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, while simultaneously giving rise to a culture of libertinism and savage polemical satire, as well as fostering the new dispassionate discourses of experimental sciences and the conventions of popular romance.

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This volume covers the period 1645-1714, and removes the traditional literary period labels and boundaries used in earlier studies to categorize the literary culture of late seventeenth-century England. It invites readers to explore the continuities and the literary innovations occurring during six turbulent decades, as English readers and writers lived through unprecedented events including a King tried and executed by Parliament and another exiled, the creation of the national entity 'Great Britain', and an expanding English awareness of the New World as well as encounters with the cultures of Asia and the subcontinent. The period saw the establishment of new concepts of authorship and it saw a dramatic increase of women working as professional, commercial writers. London theatres closed by law in 1642 reopened with new forms of entertainments from musical theatrical spectaculars to contemporary comedies of manners with celebrity actors and actresses. Emerging literary forms such as epistolary fictions and topical essays were circulated and promoted by new media including newspapers, periodical publications, and advertising and laws were changing governing censorship and taking the initial steps in the development of copyright. It was a period which produced some of the most profound and influential literary expressions of religious faith from John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, while simultaneously giving rise to a culture of libertinism and savage polemical satire, as well as fostering the new dispassionate discourses of experimental sciences and the conventions of popular romance.