18th-century Literature

This book addresses the emergence of the idea of ‘the conversation of culture’. Around 1700 a new commercial society was emerging that thought of its values as the product of exchanges between citizens. Conversation became increasingly important as a model and as a practice for how community could be created. A welter of publications, in periodical essays, in novels, and in poetry, enjoined the virtues of conversation. These publications were enthusiastically read and discussed in book clubs and literary societies that created their own conversable worlds. From some perspectives, the freedom of a distinctively English conversation allowed for the ‘collision’ of ideas and sentiments. For others, like Joseph Addison and David Hume, ease of ‘flow’ was the key issue, and politeness the means of establishing a via media. For Addison and Hume, the feminization of culture promised to make women the sovereigns of what Hume called ‘the conversable world’. As the culture seemed to open up to a multitude of voices, anxieties appeared as to how far things should be allowed to go. The unruliness of the crowd threatened to disrupt the channels of communication. There was a parallel fear that mere feminized chatter might replace learning. This book examines the influence of these developments on the idea of literature from 1762 through to 1830. Part I examines the conversational paradigm established by figures like Addison and Hume, and the proliferation of conversable worlds into gatherings like Johnson's Club and Montagu's Bluestocking assemblies. Part II looks at the transition from the eighteenth century to ‘Romantic’ ideas of literary culture, the question of the withdrawal from mixed social space, the drive to sublimate verbal exchange into forms that retained dialogue without contention in places like Coleridge's ‘conversation poems,’ and the continuing tensions between ideas of the republic of letters as a space of vigorous exchange as opposed to the organic unfolding of consciousness.

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is one of the founding texts of English literature, an epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry. It dramatically influenced Romanticism and the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Scott, and even Lewis Carroll. This book is devoted to Percy's seminal work. The book reconstructs pioneering antiquarianism and its processes of collecting, transcribing, and collating. It unravels Percy's working methods, examining his correspondence, library, and papers, as well as his friendships with scholars like Samuel Johnson. This micro-bibliographical analysis takes literary history and critical theory in significant new directions. As the book shows, the creation of historical sources and the origins of Englishness, and the practices of 18th-century editing were intertwined with themes as diverse as gardening, nightingales, forgery, and cannibalism.

This book explores the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. This social redefinition of the status of artists in Britain was shaped by a thriving print culture. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms, including exhibition reviews, art-critical pamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns. Biographical accounts of modern artists emerged in a dialogue with these other types of writing. This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers artistic biography as a malleable generic framework for investigation. Indeed, while the lives of painters in Britain did not completely abandon traditional tropes, the genre significantly widened its scope and created new individual and social narratives that reflected and accommodated the needs and desires of new reading audiences. This book also maintains that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent ‘British School’ of painting. Finally, by focusing on the emergence of individual biographies of British artists, this book examines how and why the art-historiographic model established by Georgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period.