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The Converse of the Pen

The Converse of the Pen PDF Author: Bruce Redford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226706788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Though historians of English literature have long labeled the eighteenth century the golden age of letter writing, few have paid more than lip service to the unique epistolary craftsmanship of the period. Bruce Redford corrects this omission with the first sustained investigation of the eighteenth-century familiar letter as a literary form in its own right. His study supplies the reader with a critical approach and biographical perspective for appreciating the genre that defined an era. Redford examines six masters of the "talking letter": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson. All seek the paradoxical goal of artful spontaneity. Each exploits the distinctive resources of the eighteenth-century letter writer: a flexible conversational manner, a repertoire of literary and social allusion, a flair for dramatic impersonation. The voices of these letter writers "make distance, presence," in Samuel Richardson's phrase, by devising substitutes for gesture, vocal inflection, and physical context, turning each letter into a performance--an act. The resulting verbal constructs create a mysterious tension between the claims of fact and the possibilities of art. Redford recovers a neglected literary form and makes possible a deeper understanding of major eighteenth-century writers who devoted much of their talent and time to "the converse of the pen."

The Converse of the Pen

The Converse of the Pen PDF Author: Bruce Redford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226706788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Though historians of English literature have long labeled the eighteenth century the golden age of letter writing, few have paid more than lip service to the unique epistolary craftsmanship of the period. Bruce Redford corrects this omission with the first sustained investigation of the eighteenth-century familiar letter as a literary form in its own right. His study supplies the reader with a critical approach and biographical perspective for appreciating the genre that defined an era. Redford examines six masters of the "talking letter": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson. All seek the paradoxical goal of artful spontaneity. Each exploits the distinctive resources of the eighteenth-century letter writer: a flexible conversational manner, a repertoire of literary and social allusion, a flair for dramatic impersonation. The voices of these letter writers "make distance, presence," in Samuel Richardson's phrase, by devising substitutes for gesture, vocal inflection, and physical context, turning each letter into a performance--an act. The resulting verbal constructs create a mysterious tension between the claims of fact and the possibilities of art. Redford recovers a neglected literary form and makes possible a deeper understanding of major eighteenth-century writers who devoted much of their talent and time to "the converse of the pen."

The Assembly

The Assembly PDF Author:
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9780911198300
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
Terence Tobin edits and annotates this bitingly satirical play written in 1 692 and attributed to Dr. Archibald Pitcairne. Significant as the only known full-length drama written in Scotland between the Reformation and the eighteenth century, it is a vigorous attack on religious hypocrisy.

Sir Philip Sidney and the Arcadia

Sir Philip Sidney and the Arcadia PDF Author: Marcus Selden Goldman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description


The Woman Turned Bully

The Woman Turned Bully PDF Author:
Publisher: Edicions Universitat Barcelona
ISBN: 8447532089
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Often attributed to Aphra Behn, The Woman Turned Bully presents the London adventures of a young girl who flees her home in the country, disguised as a man, to escape an arranged marriage. As she seeks inspiration in the theatre to personate the gallant, the play offers an amusing satire of the extravagances of the rake-hero of Restoration comedy. A remarkable gallery of secondary characters includes a ridiculous old lawyer and his clerk, a strong-willed country widow who drinks and smokes tobacco, and an amorous old maid. Its well-structured plot, lively dialogues and comic situations recommend it as an entertaining play for today's readers and prospective audiences. .This is the first edition of the play since its original publication in 1675. The editors offer a modernised text, with abundant critical notes and an introduction which places it in its literary and theatrical context.

The Novel: An Alternative History

The Novel: An Alternative History PDF Author: Steven Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441133364
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705

Book Description
Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.

Hereditary Genius

Hereditary Genius PDF Author: Sir Francis Galton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Genius
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description


His Most Dear Ladye

His Most Dear Ladye PDF Author: Beatrice Marshall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description


Sappho

Sappho PDF Author: Page DuBois
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857739859
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even - by the Victorians - chaste headmistress of a girls' finishing school. Yet ironically, as Page DuBois shows, the historical poet herself remains elusive. We know that Sappho's contemporary Alcaeus described her as 'violet, pure, honey-smiling Sappho'; and that the rhetorician and philosopher Maximus of Tyre saw her, perhaps less enthusiastically, as 'small and dark'. We also know that her 7th/6th century BCE island of Lesbos was riven by tyrannical and aristocratic factionalism and that she was probably exiled to Sicily. Much of the rest is speculative. DuBois suggests that the value of Sappho lies elsewhere: in her remarkable verse, and in the poet's reception - one of the richest of any figure from antiquity. Offering nuanced readings of the poems, written in an archaic Aeolic dialect, DuBois skillfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters.

The Monument

The Monument PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 652

Book Description


The Christian Parlor Magazine

The Christian Parlor Magazine PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description