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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.

The early modern period is often seen as a pivotal stage in the emergence of a recognizably modern form of the state. In Agents Beyond the State, Mark Netzloff returns to this context in order to examine the literary and social practices through which the early modern state was constituted. The state was defined not through the elaboration of theoretical models of sovereignty but rather as an effect of the literary and professional lives of its extraterritorial representatives. Netzloff focuses on the textual networks and literary production of three groups of extraterritorial agents: travelers and intelligence agents, mercenaries, and diplomats. These figures reveal the extent to which the administration of the English state as well as definitions of national culture were shaped by England’s military, commercial, and diplomatic relations in Europe and other regions across the globe. Agents Beyond the State emphasizes these transnational contexts of early modern state formation, from the Dutch Revolt and relations with Venice to the role of Catholic exiles and nonstate agents in diplomacy and international law. These global histories of travel, service, and labor additionally transformed definitions of domestic culture, from the social relations of classes and regions to the private sphere of households and families. Literary writing and state service were interconnected in the careers of Fynes Moryson, George Gascoigne, and Sir Henry Wotton, among others. As they entered the realm of print and addressed a reading public, they introduced the practices of governance to an emerging public sphere.

In this book, the author enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. The book links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth’s atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era’s theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners—or, as they are now known, “airs.” The author thus offers a new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment—the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel—which considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works such as Paradise Lost, “The Rape of the Lock,” Robinson Crusoe, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, the book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.

How did Alexander Pope become the greatest poet of the eighteenth century? Drawing on previously neglected texts and overlooked archival materials, Alexander Pope in the Making provides a radical new account of the poet’s early career, from the earliest traces of manuscript circulation to the publication of his collected Works. Joseph Hone illuminates classic poems such as An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Windsor-Forest by setting them alongside lesser-known texts by Pope and his contemporaries, many of which have never received sustained critical attention before. Pope’s earliest experiments in satire, panegyric, lyric, pastoral, and epic are all explored alongside his translations, publication strategies, and neglected editorial projects. By recovering cultural values shared by Pope and the politically heterodox men and women whose works he read and with whom he collaborated, Hone unearths powerful new interpretive possibilities for some of the eighteenth century’s most celebrated poems. Alexander Pope in the Making mounts a comprehensive challenge to the ‘Scriblerian’ paradigm that has dominated scholarship for the past eighty years. It sheds fresh light on Pope’s early career and reshapes our understanding of the ideological landscape of his era. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics.

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.

Some of the perplexities of animal rights, as a historical phenomenon, are resolved if we regard rights as neither simply intrinsic to nature nor contingent on state recognition but as a communicative transaction, a claim (etymologically, a cry) that begins before the law and yet is only realized in the law. Testing this premise, this book tracks the development of ethicopolitical community with animals in Britain from the anti-Cartesian origins of ethical sensibility in the Restoration to the first animal welfare legislation, Martin’s Act of 1822. As a semiology of creaturely affect and address, sensibility offered an unprecedented account of the non-linguistic communication humans share with other animals, of the force of the signifying voice to intervene or interpose and of its availability to redirection and remediation. The book moves from accounts of community formation in Enlightenment political philosophy, to public address in periodical culture, to poetry as a medium of advocacy, to parliamentary debates about the statutory protection of animal welfare. At stake in each of these arenas is the status of an intermediary, such as an advocate who establishes his authority to intervene in the sovereign order by staging his secondariness vis-à-vis a passionate voice that precedes him. The book recovers a discourse of sensibility in which the human appears, in the self-difference of a creature subject to history’s impress, in its answerability to the animal, and argues that the non-identity between the vocal claim and the symbolic law preserves the possibility of a justice not yet realized.

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.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. This book challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. It begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, and then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, the author reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. He then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, the book casts new light on the long eighteenth century, and on the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

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.

The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums is the first book to describe how the writer’s house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologized and materialized through the conventions of the writer’s house museum, The Author’s Effects anatomizes the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. It traces how and why the writer’s bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer’s house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns’ skull, Keats’ hair, Petrarch’s cat, Poe’s raven, Brontë’s bonnet, Dickinson’s dress, Shakespeare’s chair, Austen’s desk, Woolf’s spectacles, Hawthorne’s window, Freud’s mirror, Johnson’s coffee-pot, and Bulgakov’s stove, amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologized themselves and their work—Thoreau’s cabin and Dumas’ tower, Scott’s Abbotsford and Irving’s Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch’s Arquà, Rousseau’s Île St Pierre, and Shakespeare’s Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did there, discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare’s New Place for 2016

Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Byron and the man who published his poetry for over ten years. It is commonly seen as a paradox of Byron’s literary career that the liberal poet was published by a conservative publishing house. It is less of a paradox when, as this book illustrates, we see John Murray as a competitive, innovative publisher who understood how to deal with his most famous author. The book begins by charting the early years of Murray’s success prior to the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and describes Byron’s early engagement with the literary marketplace. The book describes in detail how Byron became one of Murray’s authors, before documenting the success of their commercial association and the eventual and protracted disintegration of their relationship. Byron wrote more letters to John Murray than anyone else and their correspondence represents a fascinating dialogue on the nature of Byron’s poetry, and particularly the nature of his fame. It is the central argument of this book that Byron’s ambivalent attitude towards professional writing and popular literature can be illuminated through an understanding of his relationship with John Murray.

Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution and, with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, this book shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization. The book explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that, as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, the book pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, the book ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.

The book reveals the extent to which writers we call “romantic” venerate and use the classics to serve their own ends in transforming poetry, epic, the novel, mythology, politics, and issues of race, as well as in practicing translation and reshaping models for a literary career and personal life. On both sides of the Atlantic the classics—including the surprising influence of Hebrew, regarded then as a classical language—play a major role in what becomes labeled Romanticism only much later in the nineteenth century. The relation between classic and romantic is not one of opposition but of a subtle and deep interpenetration. Classical texts retain an enduring, but newly transformational presence. While romantic writers regard what they are doing as new, this attitude does not prompt them to abjure lessons of genre, expression, and judgment flowing from classical authors they love. Their view is Janus-faced. Aside from one essay on Coleridge, the volume does not address major canonical British poets. Considerable work on their relation to the classics exists. Writers treated in detail include William Gilpin, Phillis Wheatley, Robert Lowth, Walter Savage Landor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, James McCune Smith, Herman Melville, S. T. Coleridge, and Edward Gibbon. Four chapters each treat multiple authors from both sides of the Atlantic. Topics include the picturesque, political rhetoric, epic invocation, mythology, imitation, ekphrasis, slavery, feminism, history and historiography, and the innovative influence of ancient Hebrew, especially its poetry.

Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) was one of the most popular and influential producers of late Georgian culture. The huge diversity of his work and career defies simple categorization. He was, often at one and the same time, an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. Consequently, he is important to many different fields for often quite dissimilar reasons. This means that a sense of his overall accomplishments—never mind the powerful reverberations of his influence—across numerous areas and in different periods may only truly be appreciated from the multiple perspectives that an interdisciplinary collaboration can offer. The chief aim of this volume is to illuminate the breadth and depth of Dibdin’s impact, and in the process offer fresh insights into previously hidden aspects of late Georgian culture. Dibdin’s importance lies in his ability to make visible the connections between various kinds of cultural production; he provides a model for thinking about late Georgian culture as a system of interconnected parts. This book illustrates the variety of Dibdin’s cultural output as characteristic of late-eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by specialization in the early nineteenth century. What emerges is not the elimination of miscellany, but rather the establishment of new cultural hierarchies in which a specialized elite culture increasingly defined itself against a continuing and vibrant culture of miscellany.

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.

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. This book disputes these assumptions, plunging into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, it uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons, the author finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. The author shows us that everyone—rich and poor, women as well as men—laughed along. In the process, he also expands our understanding of many of the century’s major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. The author devotes particular attention to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. The book is a far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.

This book argues that the Seven Years' War (1756–63) produced an intense historical consciousness within British cultural life regarding the boundaries of belonging to community, family and nation. Global warfare prompts a radical re-imagining of the state and the subjectivities of those who inhabit it. Laurence Sterne's distinctive writing provides a remarkable route through the transformations of mid-eighteenth-century British culture. The risks of war generate unexpected freedoms and crises in the making of domestic imperial subjects, which will continue to reverberate in anti-slavery struggles and colonial conflict from America to India. The book concentrates on the period from the 1750s to the 1770s. It explores the work of Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, Scott, Wheatley, Sancho, Smollett, Rousseau, Collier, Smith and Wollstonecraft alongside Sterne's narratives. The book incorporates debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, examines political tracts, poetry and grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman and Wright of Derby, tracking the investments in, and resistances to, the cultural work of empire.