Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Classics

This original and compelling study argues against the traditional identification of Arthur as a king in Celtic Britain. Instead, Graham Anderson explores the evidence for two much older figures, known to classical writers as kings of Arcadia and Lydia, over a millenium before.

He shows how these kings can be clearly connected with traditional Arthurian characters and adventure, including an ancient Gawain, a Lady of Shallott, and a predecessor of Excalibur, and shows that the Arthurian universe found in Welsh tales and French romances is already anticipated in these earliest of...

The Adventures of Telemachus is the first critical edition of Tobias Smollett's 1776 translation of Bishop Fenelon's 1699 "mirror for princes," written especially for Duc de Burgogne, heir presumptive to Louis XIV.

Both in its original French and its many translations, The Adventures of Telemachus was one of the most popular and revered works of the eighteenth century. There were more than ten English prose and poetry versions, including this masterful prose translation by Smollett. Known for his novels Roderick Random and The Expedition of Humphry...

Tobias Smollett, in the preface to his first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), acknowledges the influence of Alain RenE Le Sage's L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715-35 in four volumes) on his work. By far the most successful of "useful and entertaining" romances, Smollett writes, Gil Blas describes "the knavery and foibles of life, with infinite humour and sagacity." "The following sheets," he adds significantly, "I have modeled on his plan."

Smollett's translation of Gil Blas appeared nine months after the publication of Roderick...

The first novel by a major English writer that is devoted to a thoroughgoing portrait of villainy, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom chronicles the life of an aberrant criminal character. Filled with striking satiric thrusts at the legal, medical, and military establishments of mid-eighteenth-century Europe and England, the novel reveals Tobias Smollett's capacities as a commentator on contemporary life.

First published in 1753, Ferdinand Count Fathom is an experimental work that explores the relations between history and fiction and introduces, for the first...