In and after the Beginning : Inaugural Moments and Literary Institutions in the Long Eighteenth Century (Ams Studies in the Eighteenth-century)

Cope, Kevin L.

AMS Press（2007/04発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 379 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780404648572
• DDC分類 820.9005

Full Description

Much literature of the long eighteenth century does not neatly enter into a plot at page one and proceed chronologically and causally toward a conclusion, with the linearity of a Victorian novel. Eighteenth-century fictions can begin almost anywhere, with characters who come and go mid-tale and interpolated plots that start amid other events. This is as true of the ephemera of the period, the under-appreciated genre such as heroic drama, prose rhapsody, digest, ballad, joke anthology, and spiritual exegesis, as it is of the major works. Digression and miscellaneousness also characterize Cowper's ""The Task"", Swift's ""Tale of a Tub"", and Fielding's ""Tom Jones"". Such dispersiveness is also symptomatic of an Augustan world view in which anything and everything can be a beginning.

Contents

Introduction; 1. Congregating a Future: John Bunyan, Accumulating Aphorisms, and More-than-Modern Science; 2. In Search of an ""Empirical"" System: Locke, Mandeville, and the Mock-Heroic Enhancement of Experience; 3. Islands, Clubs, and Constellations: Daniel Defoe and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury; 4. The Beginnings of Novelty: Henry Fielding, TobiaS Smollett, Bishop George Berkeley, and the Neo-Picaresque; 5. Toward an Environmental Mode: Letting Nature Take Its Authorial Course in Richardson, Mackenzie, Burney, and Cowper.