Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Modern - 18th Century

In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer.

By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his...

Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems.

Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London...

An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire's classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek's massive online archive, http: //metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics.

Dividing the book into eleven broad metaphorical categories--Animals, Coinage, Court, Empire, Fetters, Impressions, Inhabitants, Metal, Mirror, Rooms, and Writing--Pasanek maps out constellations...

Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements--the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are inextricably bound: constructions of interiority developed in novels changed ideas about what literature could mean and do, encouraging the new focus on private experience and self-perception developed in lyric poetry.

In Lyric Generations, Gabrielle Starr rejects the genealogy of lyric poetry in which Romantic poets are thought to...

First published in 1983. This book charts the growth of Romanticism from the initial reactions to the authoritarian classicism of Louis XIV, through the codification of the Sublime by Burke in the 1750s, to the fascination with mystery, fear and violence which dominated the writing of the late eighteenth century. The origins of the movement are found in the writings of Rousseau and admiration for the noble savage, the development of the landscape garden, discoveries in the South Seas, new approaches to primitive poetry and enthusiasm for gothic art and literature. These attitudes are...

First published in 1990. The book surveys of the development of German theatre from a market sideshow into an important element of cultural life and political expression. It examines Schiller as 'theatre poet' at Mannheim, Goethe's work as director of the court theatre at Weimar, and then traces the rapid commercial decline that made it difficult for Kleist and impossible for Buchner to see their plays staged in their own lifetime. Four representative texts are analysed: Schiller's The Robbers, Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris, Kleist's The Prince of Homburg, and Buchner's...