The Nonsense Club was a group of five friends and writers--Charles Churchill, Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, William Cowper, and Robert Lloyd--who wrote and edited numerous periodicals, produced a distinctive and often brilliant satirical poetry, engaged in virulent theatrical and literary battles, and participated in the most important domestic political debate of their time. In this first comprehensive study of the group, Lance Bertelsen uses interdisciplinary methods to create a more complex understanding of the relationship between literature and culture in the era of Hogarth, Johnson,...
The Nonsense Club was a group of five friends and writers--Charles Churchill, Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, William Cowper, and Robert Lloyd--who w...
The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori that claims the lives of ten of his shipmates. Inspired by an actual event on Captain Cook's second voyage, Bowman's adventures take him to increasingly sophisticated cultures--hunter/ gatherer, pastoral/nomadic, agricultural, and commercial--that dramatize stadial history in a Pacific setting. The work provocatively weaves together popular fascination with Cook's voyages, sensational conceptions of the newly charted Pacific,...
The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a...