Novels, Rhetoric, and Criticism: A Brief History of Belles Lettres and British Literary Culture, 1680 – 1900

Novels, Rhetoric, and Criticism: A Brief History of Belles Lettres and British Literary Culture, 1680 – 1900 PDF

Author: Jack M. Downs

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2022-09-06

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1648895255

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Developing a history of the English novel requires the inclusion of a vast range of cultural, economic, religious, social, and aesthetic influences. But the role of eighteenth-century English rhetorical theory in the emergence of the novel – and the critical discourse surrounding that emergence – has often been neglected or overlooked. The influence of rhetorical theory in the development of the English novel is undeniable, however, and changes to rhetorical theory in Britain during the eighteenth century led to the development of a critical aesthetic discourse about the novel in Victorian England. This study argues that eighteenth-century 'belles lettres' rhetorical theory played a key role in developing a horizon of expectation concerning the nature and purpose of the novel that extended well into the nineteenth century. There is a connection between the emergence of the English novel, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and Victorian novel criticism that has been neglected; this study attempts to recover and articulate that connection.

Novels, Rhetoric, and Criticism

Novels, Rhetoric, and Criticism PDF

Author: Jack M. Downs

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2022-07-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781648894763

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Developing a history of the English novel requires the inclusion of a vast range of cultural, economic, religious, social, and aesthetic influences. But the role of eighteenth-century English rhetorical theory in the emergence of the novel - and the critical discourse surrounding that emergence - has often been neglected or overlooked. The influence of rhetorical theory in the development of the English novel is undeniable, however, and changes to rhetorical theory in Britain during the eighteenth century led to the development of a critical aesthetic discourse about the novel in Victorian England. This study argues that eighteenth-century 'belles lettres' rhetorical theory played a key role in developing a horizon of expectation concerning the nature and purpose of the novel that extended well into the nineteenth century. There is a connection between the emergence of the English novel, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and Victorian novel criticism that has been neglected; this study attempts to recover and articulate that connection.

Novels, Rhetoric, and Criticism: a Brief History of Belles Lettres and British Literary Culture, 1680 - 1900

Novels, Rhetoric, and Criticism: a Brief History of Belles Lettres and British Literary Culture, 1680 - 1900 PDF

Author: Jack M. Downs

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781648895777

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Developing a history of the English novel requires the inclusion of a vast range of cultural, economic, religious, social, and aesthetic influences. But the role of eighteenth-century English rhetorical theory in the emergence of the novel - and the critical discourse surrounding that emergence - has often been neglected or overlooked. The influence of rhetorical theory in the development of the English novel is undeniable, however, and changes to rhetorical theory in Britain during the eighteenth century led to the development of a critical aesthetic discourse about the novel in Victorian England. This study argues that eighteenth-century 'belles lettres' rhetorical theory played a key role in developing a horizon of expectation concerning the nature and purpose of the novel that extended well into the nineteenth century. There is a connection between the emergence of the English novel, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and Victorian novel criticism that has been neglected; this study attempts to recover and articulate that connection.

Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII

Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII PDF

Author: Seth Lerer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-08-07

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780521590013

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This revisionary study of the origins of courtly poetry reveals the culture of spectatorship and voyeurism that shaped early Tudor English literary life. Through research into the reception of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, it demonstrates how Pandarus became the model of the early modern courtier. His blend of counsel, secrecy and eroticism informed the behaviour of poets, lovers, diplomats and even Henry VIII himself. In close readings of the poetry of Hawes and Skelton, the drama of the court, the letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, the writings of Thomas Wyatt, and manuscript anthologies and early printed books, Seth Lerer illuminates a 'Pandaric' world of displayed bodies, surreptitious letters and transgressive performances. In the process, he redraws the boundaries between the medieval and the Renaissance and illustrates the centrality of the verse epistle to the construction of subjectivity.

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 PDF

Author: Ingo Berensmeyer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 311069137X

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This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

A Return to the Common Reader

A Return to the Common Reader PDF

Author: Adelene Buckland

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 135196190X

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In 1957, Richard Altick's groundbreaking work The English Common Reader transformed the study of book history. Putting readers at the centre of literary culture, Altick anticipated-and helped produce-fifty years of scholarly inquiry into the ways and means by which the Victorians read. Now, A Return to the Common Reader asks what Altick's concept of the 'common reader' actually means in the wake of a half-century of research. Digging deep into unusual and eclectic archives and hitherto-overlooked sources, its authors give new understanding to the masses of newly literate readers who picked up books in the Victorian period. They find readers in prisons, in the barracks, and around the world, and they remind us of the power of those forgotten readers to find forbidden texts, shape new markets, and drive the production of new reading material across a century. Inspired and informed by Altick's seminal work, A Return to the Common Reader is a cutting-edge collection which dramatically reconfigures our understanding of the ordinary Victorian readers whose efforts and choices changed our literary culture forever.

The Scottish Connection

The Scottish Connection PDF

Author: Franklin E Court

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2001-04-01

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780815628828

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At the outset of the eighteenth century, college language study in America concentrated on classical rhetoric. By the end of the century, due to educational innovations from Scotland, courses in rhetoric in American schools expanded to include oratory, disputation, English grammatical lessons, and the reading of English literary selections. This study of English and American literature was born in the study of moral philosophy. Combining the study of moral philosophy with language study created a course emphasis that early American professors called "philosophical criticism." The term, philosophical, carried a meaning for them that was associated with a commitment to civic responsibility, to civic discourse, and to ancient school texts such as Cicero's De Oratore where the word oratory was used to denote, according to Cicero, the mastery of all knowledge either "by scientific investigation or by the methods of dialectic." The classroom practice of disputation was also at the center of what literary historians have deemed the "oratorical tradition," a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon that, until now, has received little scholarly attention over the years.

Literary History Writing, 1770-1820

Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 PDF

Author: April London

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-04

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0230283330

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This investigation of literary history writing between 1770 and 1820 identifies the mode's distinction from canon formation as central to its cultural vitality. Using secret history, memoir and the novel, amongst other sources, it invites a re-thinking of literary history's place in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print culture.