Rationality, objectivity, symmetry: were these really principles urged and exemplified by eighteenth-century English prose? In this persuasive study, Robert W. Uphaus argues that, on the contrary, many of the most important works of the period do not actually lead the reader into a new awareness of just how problematical, how unsusceptible to reason, both the world and our easy assumptions about it are. Uphaus discusses a broad range of writers—Swift, Defoe, Mandeyville, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, and Godwin—showing that beneath their variety lies a fundamentally similar challenge, addressed to the critical procedure which assumes that the exercise of reason is a sufficient tool for an understanding the appeal of imaginative literature.
Reading the Early Republic focuses attention on the forgotten dynamism of thought in the founding era. In every case, the documents, novels, pamphlets, sermons, journals, and slave narratives of the early American nation are richer and more intricate than modern readers have perceived. Rebellion, slavery, and treason--the mingled stories of the Revolution--still haunt national thought. Robert Ferguson shows that the legacy that made the country remains the idea of what it is still trying to become. He cuts through the pervading nostalgia about national beginnings to recapture the manic-depressive tones of its first expression. He also has much to say about the reconfiguration of charity in American life, the vital role of the classical ideal in projecting an unthinkable continental republic, the first manipulations of the independent American woman, and the troubled integration of civic and commercial understandings in the original claims of prosperity as national virtue. Reading the Early Republic uses the living textual tradition against history to prove its case. The first formative writings are more than sacred artifacts. They remain the touchstones of the durable promise and the problems in republican thought
Suitable for professional and student actors, and for acting teachers, this book explains how to create a character in plays of various period, using the Stanislavsky system. It also covers the way men and women moved, stood, and sat in the clothing they wore; and, the use of accessories such as fans, swords, snuffboxes, gloves, and hats.
The people of colonial New England lived in a metaphoric landscape, beset with superstition and fear of dangers, real and imagined, seen and unseen. According to folklorist Robert St. George, meaning was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. Understanding their "language" is essential to appreciating their history. 134 illustrations.
An indispensable reference for scholars and students of eighteenth-century English literature This addition to the celebrated Wiley-Blackwell Keywords series explores the meanings of fifty-eight of the most important words in British literature of the period 1640-1789. Professor DeMaria focuses on words used with frequency and urgency throughout the works of most major and several minor writers of the British Neoclassical era, with the occasional reach back to the early seventeenth century for a definitive usage found in Francis Bacon, for instance, and look forward to the nineteenth century to the works of Wordsworth, Austen, and Keats. Through discussions of words such as atom, economy, humanity, labor, machine, slavery, society, and system he reveals underlying assumptions about the way writers of the period thought about the physical and social world. Likewise, considerations of words such as happiness, passion, truth, and virtue shed light on the ethical and moral commitments of the age. Unlike dictionaries and many big-data semantics projects, this book brings forth the ambiguities, nuances, and ironies that accrued to word usages during the period through a heightened awareness of the contexts in which they occurred. Highlights and exposes the salient cultural and literary debates and metamorphic moments of cultural thought Reveals an increase in irony and a decrease in allegorical usage as an important trend in the evolution of literary language during the Neoclassical period Stresses the contexts within which words or phrases appear in order to offer a fuller understanding of their meanings and significance than available from digital databases Draws upon a vast compilation of sources from one of the most transformative eras of English literature Rigorous in its scholarship and historical reach, British Literature 1640-1789: Keywords is an indispensable resource which scholars and students of British Neoclassical literature will want to keep close at hand. It is certain to become a fixture of most university reference libraries.
Proper Words in Proper Places: Dialectical Explication and English Literary History explores how literary history intertwines cultural, political, philosophical, religious, and commercial influences with literary production to create new ways of reading, meaning, and understanding. The text provides a delightful and surprising mix of canonical and non-canonical texts that merge many genres and literary allusions to highlight the complexities of literary historiography. Simultaneously, Proper Words in Proper Places digests the challenges of literary history and prepares readers to formulate for themselves the multiplicity of its nature and function. Drawing from texts published between 1670 and 1920, Robert J. Merrett demonstrates how the mixing and involvement of literary forms with such influences as painting, music, theatre, natural history, and notions of civility and spirituality erode simplistic ideas about the nature of narrative. His keen analysis of the traditional and experimental rhetoric of the texts serves to illustrate the double vision of the humanities and shows how the liberal arts enlighten contemporary moral issues. Additionally, the chapters probe, through their diverse models of reading, how mixed literary genres oblige us to create textual memories as our readings unfold. Merrett’s linguistic and contextual analyses heighten cognitive, psychological, and aesthetic processes, thereby demonstrating that poems, plays, novels, and other literary forms mix lexical registers and interdisciplinary discourses to counter literal-mindedness. Proper Words in Proper Places is a unique work, unsettling notions of periodicity, promoting interdisciplinarity, and countering educational indifference toward literary and aesthetic cultures. Its explanations of the diversity of literary historiography could easily inform new design models for survey courses and help prepare those about to enter teaching professions, who are expected to be familiar with the philosophical and contextual problems that motivate literary texts. It promises stimulating and thought-provoking study and invites readers to develop a sense of how literature operates as a system based on philosophical contraries and logical paradoxes.
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