18th-century Literature

During his lifetime Aaron Hill was one of the most lively cultural patrons and brokers on the London literary scene — an image hard to square with the company of undistinguished scribblers to which Pope relegated him in the Dunciad. This book aims to correct the distorted picture of the Augustan cultural scene which Pope passed down to posterity. Hill deliberately confronted Pope in his attempt to free poetry's sublime and visionary potential from the stale platitudes of neo-classical convention. An early champion of women poets, he also enjoyed close relationships with Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, and brought his three writing daughters Urania, Astrea, and Minerva into close contact with his lifelong friend the novelist Samuel Richardson. In 1711 Hill, as stage manager and librettist, introduced Handel to the English stage, as well as lobbying tirelessly for innovation in the 18th-century theatre. His entrepreneurial energies, directed at both commercial and cultural projects, mirror the zeitgeist of early Hanoverian Britain.

As a very young man, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century translated a tome about Ethiopia. This experience permanently marked Samuel Johnson, leaving traces of the African discourse he encountered in that text in his drama Irene;several of his short stories; and his most famous fiction, Rasselas. This book provides a much needed perspective in comparative literature and postcolonial studies on the power of the discourse of the other to infuse European texts. This book illuminates how the Western literary canon is globally produced by developing the powerful metaphor of spirit possession to posit some texts in the European canon as energumens, texts that are spoken through. The model of discursive possession offers a new way of theorizing transcultural intertextuality, in particular how Europe’s others have co-constituted European representations. Through close readings of primary and secondary sources in English, French, Portuguese, and Gəʿəz, the book challenges conventional wisdom on Johnson’s work, from the inspiration for the name Rasselas and the nature of Johnson’s religious beliefs to what makes Rasselas so strange.

This book examines how major writers of the French Enlightenment discuss the social appropriateness of anger and gratitude in regulating social life. Defining the kinds of slight or favor that demand an angry or a grateful response became problematic in eighteenth-century France under the pressure of two contradictory developments which were both crucial to Enlightenment thinking about sociability. The first drew on the ideal of moral equality as it spread beyond the salons to the social world at large. Writers claimed for themselves an entitlement to anger at personal slight that had been hitherto reserved for aristocrats, and a respectful hearing for their indignation at public injustice despite their lack of official standing. The philosophes also argued their writing made them social benefactors in their own right, more deserving of their readers' gratitude than obliged to any patron. The second gave a new twist to longstanding philosophical notions about transcending emotional disturbance and dependence altogether. A personal ideal became a public goal as Enlightenment thinkers imagined a society where all significant social interaction was governed by the impersonal rule of law. Occasions for personal slight or obligation would disappear, and with them reasons for anger and gratitude. The same writers who justified their emotional claims also legitimized their cultural authority through displays of rationality and objectivity that indicated their own liberation from emotional bonds. Through analyses of works by Robert Challe, Marivaux, Rousseau, and Diderot, this book shows how the tension between these two rhetorics is crucial to the creativity of French Enlightenment writing.

Aphra Behn, now becoming recognized as a major Restoration figure, is especially significant as an early example of a successful professional woman writer: an important and often troubling role-model for later generations of women. This book shows that her influence on 18th-century literature was far-reaching. Because literary history was (and to an extent still is) based on notions of patrilineal succession, it has been difficult to recognize the generative work of women's texts among male writers. This book suggests that Behn had 'sons' as well as ‘daughters’ and argues that we need a feminist revision of the notion of literary influence. Behn's reputation was very different in different genres. The book analyses her reception as a poet, a novelist, and a dramatist, showing how reactions to her became an important part of the creation of the English literary canon.

Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a 14th-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts—and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of chapters by noted scholars from “East,” “West,” and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.

Where previous studies of ‘Augustanism’ have concentrated largely upon political concerns, this book explores the translation of the Roman Augustan aesthetic into a vernacular equivalent by English neoclassical poets and does so through the analysis of translations. It has its genesis in the claim made implicitly by Dryden at the conclusion of his Virgil that he had given English poetry the kind of refinement in language and style that Virgil had given the Latin. The opening chapter explores the mediation of the Augustan aesthetic to the early Renaissance by way of the De Arte Poetica of the neo Latin Renaissance poet Vida, represented here in the Augustan version of Pitt. The second chapter charts early English engagements with the classical inheritance before moving on to its chief focus, Dryden's relation to his early predecessors in the refinement of the heroic couplet, Denham and Waller, and the establishment of the full Augustan aesthetic represented in Dryden's Virgil. The third and fourth chapters consider the effect of the Augustan aesthetic upon the translation of silver Latin poets, concentrating on Dryden's Persius and Juvenal, Rowe's Lucan and Pope's Statius and finally on the climactic Augustan achievement, Pope's Homer. The distinguishing strengths of Augustan poetic artistry are shown to advantage in a brief epilogue juxtaposing Augustan and modern versions.

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.

Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, lived during a period of dramatic historical, political, and social change in Britain, and was by any standard a superb observer of his times. Through his pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction he commented on anything and everything, from birth control to the price of coal, from flying machines to academies for women, from security for the aged to the dangers of the plague. In his fiction he created a type of vivid realism that powerfully influenced the development of the novel. The publication of works such as Robinson Crusoe are major events because they shape the ways in which we see our world, so that ever afterwards thoughts of desolation and desert islands immediately evoke Defoe's masterpiece. From his earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions. This life gives us a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that went into Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.

This book is an examination of three major French thinkers of the 17th-century — Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche — of whom the latter two are comparatively little studied in the English-speaking world. It deals with a common attitude of suspicion towards everyday experience, which they see as dominated and obscured by sensation, imagination, and the presence of the body. This attitude, however, obliges them to develop detailed and sophisticated accounts of the shaping of experience, not only by the body but by interpersonal and social relationships, and of the tension between human nature as it is and as we experience it. The treatment of Descartes thus challenges the interpretation that sees him as eliminating the body from ‘subjectivity’, while that of Pascal and Malebranche shows how their critical attitude towards experience (a fertile source for 20th-century French thinkers) is linked with their religious doctrines, especially their Augustinian emphasis on Original Sin.