Cynthia Sundberg Wall's Books

The Prose of Things

Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

By: Cynthia Sundberg Wall

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The Prose of Things

Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

By: Cynthia Sundberg Wall

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception. In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing.

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Page Count

331

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022622502X

ISBN 13

9780226225029

The Prose of Things

Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

By: Cynthia Sundberg Wall

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Prose of Things

Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century

By: Cynthia Sundberg Wall

Average ratings

N/A

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Age

Page Count

331

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022622502X

ISBN 13

9780226225029

Grammars of Approach

Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque

By: Cynthia Wall

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Grammars of Approach

Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque

By: Cynthia Wall

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the “lesser parts of speech”. The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.

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Page Count

355

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022646783X

ISBN 13

9780226467832

Book's by Cynthia Sundberg Wall

The Prose of Things

The Prose of Things

The Prose of Things

The Prose of Things

Grammars of Approach

Grammars of Approach

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