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  3. Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought

Monographs and critical studies on authors, works, genres, and all aspects of eighteenth-century literary culture.

  • General Editors: Howard Erskine-Hill, Pembroke College, Cambridge, John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania

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20 results in Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought

The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
  • David Womersley
  • Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    17 November 1988
  • David Womersley's book investigates Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work's transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally discarded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emerges from this study as a work more flexible in its sympathies and surprising in its judgements than has hitherto been granted, while the magnitude of Gibbon's achievement as a stylist, historian and thinker is brought into sharper focus.

Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle
  • Jonathan Lamb
  • Published online:
    05 February 2012
    Print publication:
    05 October 1989
  • The author of Tristram Shandy made frequent use of literary fragments from other writers, as part of his own style. Laurence Sterne's quotations, plagiarisms and allusions were often employed in the service of the pleonasm, or 'performed pun'. Jonathan Lamb describes Sterne's operation of the pleonasm as his 'double principle'. He sees this style not as the key to some clever puzzle whose clues we go on solving in the hope of total disclosure of meaning (as some critics have claimed); rather the opposite, that it is a consoling reminder that neither we nor the text can ever be complete. Lamb severs Sterne from the Locke tradition and frees him from the 'influence' oriented studies which have aimed to authenticate him through his borrowings. This allows us to read him as a writer eagerly exploring the turns and paradoxes of associationist thought and adapting the rhetoric of the sublime to the stutterings of ordinary speech.

Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
  • The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere
  • John P. Zomchick
  • Published online:
    10 February 2010
    Print publication:
    11 March 1993
  • Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers challenging interpretations of the public and private faces of individualism in the eighteenth-century English novel. John P. Zomchick begins by surveying the social, historical and ideological functions of law and the family in England's developing market economy. He goes on to examine in detail their part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the protagonists in Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Clarissa, Smollett's Roderick Random, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Godwin's Caleb Williams. Zomchick reveals in these novels an attempt to produce a 'juridical subject': a representation of the individual identified with the principles and aims of the law, and motivated by an inherent need for affection and community fulfilled by the family. Their ambivalence towards that formulation indicates a nostalgia for less competitive social relations, and an emergent liberal critique of the law's operation in the service of society's elites.

Arguments of Augustan Wit
  • John Sitter
  • Published online:
    28 January 2010
    Print publication:
    12 December 1991
  • Comic and satiric literature from the 1670s to the 1740s is characterized by the allusive and elusive word play of Augustan wit. The arguments of Augustan wit reveal preoccupations with the metaphorical dimension of language so distrusted by Locke and others who saw it as fundamentally opposed to the rational mode of judgement. John Sitter makes a challenging claim for the importance of wit in the writings of Dryden, Rochester, Prior, Berkeley, Gay, Pope and Swift, as an analytic mode as well as one of stylistic sophistication. He argues that wit - often regarded by modern critics as a quaint category of verbal cleverness - in fact offers to literary theory a legacy corrective of Romantic and neo-Romantic idealizations of imagination. This study aims at once to emphasize the historical specificity of Augustan writing, and to bring its arguments into dialogue with those of our time.

Literary Transmission and Authority
  • Dryden and Other Writers
  • Edited by Earl Miner, Jennifer Brady
  • Published online:
    19 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 July 1993
  • Dryden's writings are studded with names, conspicuously those of his literary predecessors and contemporaries. He defined himself as a writer in relation to other writers, and in doing so was something of a pioneer professional man of letters: poet, playwright, critic, prose stylist, England's foremost verse translator, the first literary historian to provide a conception of periods, and what would now be termed a comparatist. This 1993 book looks at Dryden's literary relationships with Ben Jonson and with French authors (notably Corneille), at issues raised by the work thought to be his greatest by Romantic and contemporary readers, Fables Ancient and Modern; and at Samuel Johnson's definition of Dryden, whose biography in Johnson's Lives was the author's favourite. The book has implications for questions of literary reception, influence and intertextuality, as well as for the reputation and context of Dryden himself.

Reason, Grace, and Sentiment
  • A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780
  • Volume 2, Shaftesbury to Hume
  • Isabel Rivers
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    09 March 2000
  • This volume completes Isabel Rivers' widely acclaimed exploration of the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. She investigates the effect of attempts to separate ethics from religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. Focusing on moral philosophy and the educational institutions in which (or in spite of which) these ideas were developed, the book pays close attention to the movement of ideas through the British Isles, in particular the spread of Shaftesbury's thought from England to Ireland and Scotland, and the varied reception of Hume's scepticism north and south of the border. It also demonstrates the enormous influence of Shaftesbury's moral thought and the ultimate triumph of the English interpretation of Shaftesbury with the rise of Butler. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this volume makes a vital contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century thought.

Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy
  • William Walker
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    01 December 1994
  • William Walker's original analysis of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding offers a challenging and provocative assessment of Locke's importance as a thinker, bridging the gap between philosophical and literary-critical discussion of his work. He presents Locke as a foundational figure who defines the epistemological and ontological ground on which eighteenth-century and Romantic literature operate and eventually diverge. He is revealed as a crucial figure for emerging modernity, less the familiar empiricist innovator and more the proto-Nietzschean thinker whose text fosters hitherto unsuspected instabilities and promotes a new kind of rhetorical force to counterbalance them. Walker's reading of Locke is at once finely attentive to the text and engagingly resourceful in placing the Essay in its broadest philosophical and historical context.

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
  • Murray G. H. Pittock
  • Published online:
    23 November 2009
    Print publication:
    27 October 1994
  • The aim of this book is to question assumptions about the nature of the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology. Taking as its starting point the fundamental ambivalence of the Augustan concept the author studies canonical and non-canonical literature and uncovers the 'four nations' literary history of the period defined in terms of a struggle for control of the language of authority between Jacobite and Hanoverian writers. This struggle is seen to have crystallized Irish and Scottish opposition to the British state. The Jacobite cause generated powerful popular literature and the sources explored include ballads, broadsides and writing in Scots, Irish, Welsh and Gaelic. The author concludes that the literary history we inherit is built on the political outcome of the Revolution of 1688.

History and the Early English Novel
  • Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe
  • Robert Mayer
  • Published online:
    31 October 2009
    Print publication:
    03 April 1997
  • This new study of the origins of the English novel argues that the novel emerged from historical writing. Examining historical writers and forms frequently neglected by earlier scholars, Robert Mayer shows that in the seventeenth century historical discourse embraced not only 'history' in its modern sense, but also fiction, polemic, gossip, and marvels. Mayer thus explains why Defoe's narratives were initially read as history. It is the acceptance of the claims to historicity, the study argues, that differentiates Defoe's fictions from those of writers like Thomas Deloney and Aphra Behn, important writers who nevertheless have figured less prominently than Defoe in discussions of the novel. Mayer ends by exploring the theoretical implications of the history-fiction connection. His study makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the emergence of what we now call the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century.

Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry
  • John Goodridge
  • Published online:
    30 October 2009
    Print publication:
    18 January 1996
  • Recent research into a self-taught tradition of English rural poetry has begun to offer a radically new dimension to our view of the role of poetry in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. In this important new study John Goodridge offers a detailed reading of key rural poems of the period, examines the ways in which eighteenth-century poets adapted Virgilian Georgic models, and reveals an illuminating link between rural poetry and agricultural and folkloric developments. Goodridge compares poetic accounts of rural labour by James Thomson, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier, and makes a close analysis of one of the largely forgotten didactic epics of the eighteenth century, John Dyer's The Fleece. Through an exploration of the purpose of rural poetry and how it relates to the real world, Goodridge breaks through the often brittle surface of eighteenth-century poetry, to show how it reflects the ideologies and realities of contemporary life.

Narratives of Enlightenment
  • Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon
  • Karen O'Brien
  • Published online:
    28 October 2009
    Print publication:
    05 June 1997
  • Narratives of Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary study of cosmopolitan approaches to the past. It reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America; and it investigates the nature and degree of their intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation. Karen O'Brien combines the methodologies of literary criticism and intellectual history to explore debates about Enlightenments and the political uses of narrative. Where previous studies have emphasised the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, she reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

Richardson's 'Clarissa' and the Eighteenth-Century Reader
  • Tom Keymer
  • Published online:
    24 October 2009
    Print publication:
    09 April 1992
  • Written as a collection of letters in which very different accounts of the action are unsupervised by sustained authorial comment, Richardson's novel Clarissa offers an extreme example of the capacity of narrative to give the reader final responsibility for resolving or construing meaning. It is paradoxical then that its author was a writer committed to avowedly didactic goals. Tom Keymer counters the tendency of recent critics to suggest that Clarissa's textual indeterminacy defeats these goals by arguing that Richardson pursues subtler and more generous means of educating his readers by making them 'if not Authors, Carvers' of the text. Discussing Richardson's use of the epistolary form throughout his career, Keymer goes on to focus in detail on the three instalments in which Clarissa was first published, drawing on the documented responses of its first readers to illuminate his technique as a writer and set the novel in its contemporary ethical, political and ideological context.

Swift's Parody
  • Robert Phiddian
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    09 November 1995
  • Jonathan Swift's prose has been discussed extensively as satire, but its major structural element, parody, has not received the attention it deserves. Focusing mainly on works before 1714, and especially on A Tale of a Tub, this study explores Swift's writing primarily as parody. Robert Phiddian follows the constructions and deconstructions of textual authority through the texts on cultural-historical, biographical, and literary-theoretical levels. The historical interest lies in the occasions of the parodies: in their relations with the texts and discourses which they quote and distort, and in the way this process reflects on the generation of cultural authority in late Stuart England. The biographical interest lies in a new way of viewing Swift's early career as a potentially Whiggish intellectual. The theoretical and interpretative interest lies in tracing the play of language and irony through parody.

The Body in Swift and Defoe
  • Carol Houlihan Flynn
  • Published online:
    21 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 July 1990
  • This original book takes a new look at problems surrounding the physical, material nature of the human body, in particular as represented in the works of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. It examines the role that literary invention (with its rhetorical and linguistic strategies) plays in expressing and exploring the problems of physicality, and deals with issues such as sexuality, cannibalism, scatology and the fear of contagion. Swift and Defoe are seen as writers confronting the essentially modern problem of what it is to be human in a rapidly developing consumer economy, where individual bodies, beset by poverty and disease, are felt to be threatened by the enveloping masses of urban crowds. In an eclectic synthesis of recent approaches, Carol Flynn works into her study the insights provided by biographical and psychoanalytic criticism, Marxism and social history, studies of eighteenth-century philosophy, and feminist readings. Her challenging approach reviews the cost of being human, the 'expense' of material as opposed to spiritual life in eighteenth-century society, as it is revealed in its literature.

Mania and Literary Style
  • The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart
  • Clement Hawes
  • Published online:
    16 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 January 1996
  • This highly original study of the 'manic style' in enthusiastic writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries identifies a literary tradition and line of influence running from the radical visionary and prophetic writing of the Ranters and their fellow enthusiasts to the work of Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. Clement Hawes offers a counterweight to recent work which has addressed the subject of literature and madness from the viewpoint of contemporary psychological medicine, putting forward instead a stylistic and rhetorical analysis. He argues that the writings of dissident 'enthusiastic' groups are based in social antagonisms; and his account of the dominant culture's ridicule of enthusiastic writing (an attitude which persists in twentieth-century literary history and criticism) provides a powerful and daring critique of pervasive assumptions about madness and sanity in literature.

Crime and Defoe
  • A New Kind of Writing
  • Lincoln B. Faller
  • Published online:
    14 September 2009
    Print publication:
    01 April 1993
  • This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised deeply troubling questions in Defoe's time, not least as a powerful sign of the breakdown of traditional social authority and order. Arguing that Defoe's novels, like criminal biography, provided ways of facing and working through, as well as avoiding, certain of the moral and intellectual difficulties that crime raised for him and his readers, Faller shows how the 'literary', even 'aesthetic' qualities of his fiction contributed to these ends. Analysing the ways in which Defoe's novels exploited, deformed and departed from the genre they imitated, this book attempts to define the specific social and political (which is to say moral and ideological) value of a given set of 'literary' texts against those of a more 'ordinary' form of narrative.

Landscape, Liberty and Authority
  • Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth
  • Tim Fulford
  • Published online:
    14 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1996
  • Eighteenth-century landscape description formed part of a larger debate over the nature of liberty and authority which was vital to a Britain newly defining its nationhood in a period of growing imperial power and rapid economic change. Tim Fulford examines landscape description in the writings of Thomson, Cowper, Johnson, Gilpin, Repton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others, revealing tensions that arose as writers struggled for authority over the public sphere and sought to redefine the nature of that authority. In his investigation of poetry and political and aesthetic writing, Dr Fulford throws light on the legacy of Commonwealth and Country-party ideas of liberty. Also discussed are the significance of the Miltonic sublime, the politics of the picturesque and the post-colonial encounter of the Scottish tour. Dr Fulford goes on to show how the early radicalism and later conservatism of Wordsworth and Coleridge were shaped, in part, by eighteenth-century literary political and literary authorities. His study offers an understanding of literary and political influence that cuts across conventional periodization, finding new links between the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Swift's Politics
  • A Study in Disaffection
  • Ian Higgins
  • Published online:
    25 August 2009
    Print publication:
    05 May 1994
  • Modern scholarship has represented Jonathan Swift as both an Old Whig and a non-Jacobite Tory. Ian Higgins' contextual reassessment of Swift's political writing and recorded opinion considers the interpretative problems they present. It explores the consonance of Swift's political writing with militant Jacobite Tory writing on affairs of Church and State, and demonstrates Swift's dissimilarity from the Old Whig writers with whom modern criticism has misleadingly identified him. Swift's writings of the 1690s, during the last four years of Queen Anne's reign, and after the Hanoverian succession are shown to contain Jacobitical political implications when examined in their context in the 'paper wars' of the period. Higgins concentrates on the partisan meanings of the great satires A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, and represents Swift (as he was read by his contemporaries) as a disaffected High Church Anglican extremist with Jacobite inclinations.

The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy
  • Peter Walmsley
  • Published online:
    21 August 2009
    Print publication:
    31 August 1990
  • The works of George Berkeley (1685–1753) have been the object of much philosophical analysis; but philosophers are writers as well as thinkers, and Berkeley was himself positively interested in the functions of language and style. He recognized that words are used not just to convey ideas, but to stir the emotions and influence the behaviour of the hearer or reader. The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy, first published in 1990, offers rhetorical and literary analyses of his four major philosophical texts, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Alciphron and Siris. The Berkeley that emerges from this study is an accomplished stylist, one who builds structures of affective imagery, who creates dramatic voices in his texts, and who masters the range of philosophical genres - the treatise, the dialogue and the essay. Above all, Berkeley's awareness of the rhetorical functions of language is everywhere evident in his own style. His texts persuade as well as prove, enacting a process of inquiry so that the reader may, in the end, grasp Berkeley's truths as his own.

Defoe's Politics
  • Parliament, Power, Kingship and 'Robinson Crusoe'
  • Manuel Schonhorn
  • Published online:
    19 August 2009
    Print publication:
    29 March 1991
  • This study of Defoe's politics aims to challenge the critical demand to see Defoe as a 'modern' and to counter misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring them to their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full examination of Defoe's years as a political reporter and journalist (1689–1715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on contemporary issues: the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and how monarchies are created and maintained as the means of achieving a beneficent political order. At the heart of Defoe's political imagination, Manuel Schonhorn finds the vision of a warrior-king, derived from sources in the Bible and in ancient and English history. This model illuminates his original reading of Defoe's greatest political fiction, Robinson Crusoe, which emerges less in terms of a family romance, a tract for the rising bourgeoisie or a Lockean parable of government, than as a dramatic re-enactment of Defoe's lifelong political preoccupations concerning society, government and kingship.