LITR 315 - Restoration & Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Explores the meanings of fifty-eight of the most important words in British literature of the period 1640-1789.

This 'Handbook' surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

Traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel.

A lively exploration of the evolution of the English novel from 1688-1815. A range of major works and authors are discussed along with important developments in the genre, and the impact of novels on society at the time.

Offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how early artistic experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.

Investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world - mechanistic materialism and vitalism - in the works of leading British and French writers.

Describes the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and the Gothic novels, poetry, and drama of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Posits that the Gothic reflects a new and darker vision of the ancient world: no longer inspiring modernity through its examples, antiquity has become a ghost, haunting contemporary minds rather than guiding them.

Framed by the publication of Leviathan and the 1713 Licensing Act, this collection provides analysis of both canonical and non-canonical texts within the scope of an eighty-year period of theatre history, allowing for definition and assessment that uncouples Restoration drama from eighteenth-century drama.

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.

The Mind Is a Collection approaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theory of the mind from a material point of view, examining the metaphors for mental activity that invoked the material activity of collection.

Explores the major themes throughout Austen's novels, setting them in the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which they emerge, and showing how they engage with social tensions in an era dominated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Explores Wollstonecraft's views on society, knowledge and the mind, human nature, and the problem of evil--and how a society based on mutual respect could fight it.

Focuses on Swift, the genres and authors who influenced him, and his impact on satire and satirists from his own time to the twentieth century.

Analyzes Defoe's four novels of criminal life against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography.

By demonstrating a stylistic and thematic continuity across the full range of Austen's work, Johnston asks whether it makes sense to speak of an early and a late Austen at all. Offers a new picture of the author in all her complexity and ambiguity, and shows us that it is not necessarily true that early work yields to later, better things.

Pursues the origins of the modern middle-class home through discourses--including philosophy, law, religion, economics, and aesthetics--all of which involve literary representations. A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Identifies a vigilant attentiveness to sex across a wide spectrum of literary and philosophical texts in eighteenth-century Britain. Argues that the recurring turn to sexuality in literature allowed authors to recommend how the risque delights of reading might excite the imagination to greater degrees of educability on moral and aesthetic matters.

Observes that in eighteenth-century British culture, the best mother was absent, disembodied, voiceless or dead. By focusing on mothers in novels, plays, poems, realist fiction, fairy tales, satire and romance, Francus reclaims silenced maternal perspectives.

Explores the complicated relationships between domestic servants and their masters through close readings of eighteenth-century texts. Highlights gender and sexuality; class, labor, and markets; family relationships; and violence.