Darryl P Domingo | University of Memphis (original) (raw)
Books by Darryl P Domingo
Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did... more Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did their readers come to enjoy linguistic and textual devices that self-consciously disrupt the reading experience? Darryl P. Domingo answers these questions through an examination of the formative period in the commercialization of leisure in England, and the coincidental coming-of-age of literary self-consciousness in works published between approximately 1690 and 1760. During this period, commercial entertainers tested out new ways of gratifying a public increasingly eager for amusement, while professional writers explored the rhetorical possibilities of intrusion, obstruction, and interruption through their characteristic use of devices like digression. Such devices adopt similar forms and fulfil similar functions in literature as do diversions in culture: they “unbend the mind,” according to Domingo, and reveal the complex reciprocity between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the age of Swift, Pope, and Fielding.
CONTENTS.
“Unbending the Mind”: Introduction by Way of Diversion
Reading and Diversionary Rhetoric, 1690-1760
The Pleasures of Satire
The Topography of Pleasure
Bill of Fare
CHAPTER 1
“The Predominant Taste of the Present Age”: Diversion and the Literary Market
The Genealogy of Commercialized Leisure
Advertising, Audience, and Individualized Amusement
Time and the Attack on Diversion
Mental Unbending and the Work of Leisure
Animadversions Upon Diversion
Leisure for Literature
CHAPTER 2
“Pleas’d at Being so Agreeably Deceiv’d”: Pantomime and the Poetics of Dumb Wit
Augustan Wit and the Apology for Pantomime
Metaphor and Metamorphosis
Pantomimic Poetics
The Region of False Wit: A Two-Part Afterpiece
The Serious - The Comic
CHAPTER 3
“Fasten’d by the Eyes”: Popular Wonder, Print Culture, and the Exhibition of Monstrosity
Reading the Monstrous
Sightseeing and Scriblerian Satire
Monsters and Mimesis
The Monstrosity of Print Culture
Monsters and the Matter of Modernity
Teratological Textuality
CHAPTER 4
“Pleasantry for thy Entertainment”: Novelistic Discourse and the Rhetoric of Diversion
Digression and the Problem of Satiety
The Novel as a Mode of Entertainment
Plotting Diversion in Fielding’s Tom Jones
Interest and Audience Response
Diversionary Reading and the Rhetoric of Fiction
“The Soul of Reading”: Conclusion by Way of Animadversion
Shandean Digression and the Ends of Diversion
Articles by Darryl P Domingo
The Review of English Studies, 2015
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2012
Although Elias Brand contributes only one letter to the first edition of Clarissa, and three lett... more Although Elias Brand contributes only one letter to the first edition of Clarissa, and three letters to the revised third edition of 1751, he is considered by Samuel Richardson important enough to include in his list of the "Principal Characters." This article accounts for Brand's complicated role by analyzing in detail the meaning of the forty-five quotations punctuating his letters, as well as the manner in which he quotes his tags and texts. Brand's marshalling of spurious evidence against Clarissa and his habit of quoting authors as authorities suggests that the latter may be a key to the credibility of the former. Brand repre sents himself as a confirmed "Ancient," but taking the pedant at his own word is dangerous because of the extent of his surprising debt to the British "Moderns" and to the seventeenth-century Oxford scholar and Anglo-Latin poet, John Owen. This article concludes that Brand's letters are thematic and structurally integral to a novel that is, in many ways, about the consequences of right and wrong reading.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2009
Drawing attention to the complex reciprocal relationship between commercialized leisure and comme... more Drawing attention to the complex reciprocal relationship between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the so-called "Age of Wit," this essay reconceives of the witty and witless in two important ways. Taking for granted, first of all, that wit is usually analyzed in terms of the efficacy of verbal language, the essay examines how and why debates concerning true and false wit were played out in physical terms-in this case, through the motions, gestures, and attitudes of the dancing body. Second of all, the essay attempts to account for the enduring, if unwitting, attractions of " false wit" by likening it to the tricks and transformations of contemporary English pantomime. Satirists of the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s frequently invoke the unmeaning motion of Harlequin as a visual way of proscribing the verbal excesses of extravagant language. At the same time, apologists for pantomime associate Harlequin's "dumb Wit" with truth, reason, and the pattern of nature, claiming that the genre's corporeality allowed it to transcend the limitations and equivocations of words. The essay concludes that the popularity of pantomime contextualizes the Augustan reaction against false wit, in that it identifies a source of aesthetic pleasure in the public's eagerness to be duped by apparent sameness in difference. Early eighteenth-century readers enjoy luxuriant, illogical, and mixed metaphors, forced similes, and trifling jibes and quibbles for the same reason that early eighteenth-century spectators delight in the unexpected turns of pantomimic entertainment: in a world under the sway of Harlequin's magical slapstick, audiences derive satisfaction from being deceived. X 52 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2005
Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2004
Book Chapters by Darryl P Domingo
Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 356: Eighteenth-Century Literary Scholars and Critics, 2010
Book Reviews by Darryl P Domingo
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2014
The Review of English Studies, 2012
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012
The Review of English Studies, 2008
Editions by Darryl P Domingo
Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned... more Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned in his own time as a prolific and highly successful dramatist. Among his most popular plays was The Tragedy of Tragedies: Or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, one of the most extraordinary parodies in English theater. The print version of the play incorporates, in an elaborate structure of annotations, a remarkable satire of heroic drama and of the pretensions and excesses of "false scholarship."
This edition includes the text of the play itself and the text of the extraordinary notes (by Fielding's pseudonym "H. Scriblerus Secundus"), appearing in facing page layout; extensive explanatory notes for the modern reader appear at the bottom of the page. Also included are a substantial introduction and a wide range of background materials that set the work in the context of its time. These contextual materials include contemporary reviews, excerpts from the plays that Fielding's parody most frequently targeted, and selections from works that provided inspiration for The Tragedy of Tragedies—from contemporary versions of the "Tom Thumb" folktale to satirical writing by authors such as Alexander Pope, John Gay, and George Villiers.
Comments:
"Featuring an excellent introduction, extensive notes and a generous sampling of contextual materials, this splendid new classroom edition of Henry Fielding's The Tragedy of Tragedies makes one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century come alive for today's students. It will be useful to teachers of eighteenth-century British literature as well as of drama or theatre surveys." – Albert J. Rivero, Marquette University
"Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies provides a master comedian's compact compendium of the heterogeneous sources of laughter and comic insight: farcical action and burlesque situations; literary parody; satire of bombast and pedantry; physical and verbal incongruities (a miniature hero and giant queen, diction that regularly plummets from lofty to low); mind-bending philosophical puzzles (a ghost threatened with death by sword); temporal inversions (footnotes asserting that lines from earlier plays have been cribbed from this one); reductions of poetic form ("Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh"); and the bathos of compression and acceleration (seven stabbing deaths within ten lines at the play's close). The Broadview edition makes the play's full array of comic techniques readily accessible to any reader: effectively edited and cleverly formatted as a facing-page edition, with Fielding's mock-scholarly footnotes filling right-hand pages, the edition would serve equally well as the basis for uproariously funny stage productions and for study as a revealing print artifact from the Augustan Age. I recommend this edition as required reading for courses on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, The Age of Swift and Pope, theater history, eighteenth-century literature, book history, and literary theory—and as pleasure reading for anyone interested in drama, the novel, or a good laugh." – Jill Campbell, Yale University
Table of Contents:
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Tragedy of Tragedies: or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great
IN CONTEXT:
I. Sources and Satiric Models
From The Famous History of Tom Thumb (1750)
From George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1672)
From William Wagstaffe, A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb (1711)
From John Gay, The What D'Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (1715)
From Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
From Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous: Or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728)
From Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum (1729)
From James Ralph, The Touch-Stone: Or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town (1728)
From Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb. A Tragedy.…Written by Scriblerus Secundus (1730)
II. "Acting Play" to "Reading Play": Performance, Print, Parody
From John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards and "Of Heroic Plays: An Essay" (1672)
From John Dryden, All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost (1678)
From Thesaurus Dramaticus. Containing all the Celebrated Passages, Soliloquies, Similes, Descriptions, and Other Poetical Beauties in the Body of English Plays, Ancient and Modern, Digested Under Proper Topics (1724)
From James Thomson, The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1730)
III. Reception
From Advertisements in Contemporary Periodicals (1731)
From London Evening Post (18–20 March 1731)
From Daily Post (19 March 1731)
From Daily Post (22 March 1731)
From Daily Post (28 April 1731)
From The Universal Spectator (10 April 1731)
From The Grub-Street Journal (18 November 1731)
From William Hatchett and Eliza Haywood,The Opera of Operas; Or, Tom Thumb the Great. Altered from The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. And Set to Musick after the Italian Manner (1733)
From Observations on the Present Taste for Poetry (1739)
From Giles Jacob, The Mirrour: Or, Satyrical, Panegyrical, Serious, and Humorous on the Present Times (1733)
From Samuel Foote, Taste. A Comedy of Two Acts (1752)
From David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica: Or, A Companion to the Playhouse (1764)
From William Hazlitt, "Of the Comic Writers of the Last Century" (1819)
Papers by Darryl P Domingo
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
Samuel Richardson in Context
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2018
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did... more Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did their readers come to enjoy linguistic and textual devices that self-consciously disrupt the reading experience? Darryl P. Domingo answers these questions through an examination of the formative period in the commercialization of leisure in England, and the coincidental coming-of-age of literary self-consciousness in works published between approximately 1690 and 1760. During this period, commercial entertainers tested out new ways of gratifying a public increasingly eager for amusement, while professional writers explored the rhetorical possibilities of intrusion, obstruction, and interruption through their characteristic use of devices like digression. Such devices adopt similar forms and fulfil similar functions in literature as do diversions in culture: they “unbend the mind,” according to Domingo, and reveal the complex reciprocity between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the age of Swift, Pope, and Fielding.
CONTENTS.
“Unbending the Mind”: Introduction by Way of Diversion
Reading and Diversionary Rhetoric, 1690-1760
The Pleasures of Satire
The Topography of Pleasure
Bill of Fare
CHAPTER 1
“The Predominant Taste of the Present Age”: Diversion and the Literary Market
The Genealogy of Commercialized Leisure
Advertising, Audience, and Individualized Amusement
Time and the Attack on Diversion
Mental Unbending and the Work of Leisure
Animadversions Upon Diversion
Leisure for Literature
CHAPTER 2
“Pleas’d at Being so Agreeably Deceiv’d”: Pantomime and the Poetics of Dumb Wit
Augustan Wit and the Apology for Pantomime
Metaphor and Metamorphosis
Pantomimic Poetics
The Region of False Wit: A Two-Part Afterpiece
The Serious - The Comic
CHAPTER 3
“Fasten’d by the Eyes”: Popular Wonder, Print Culture, and the Exhibition of Monstrosity
Reading the Monstrous
Sightseeing and Scriblerian Satire
Monsters and Mimesis
The Monstrosity of Print Culture
Monsters and the Matter of Modernity
Teratological Textuality
CHAPTER 4
“Pleasantry for thy Entertainment”: Novelistic Discourse and the Rhetoric of Diversion
Digression and the Problem of Satiety
The Novel as a Mode of Entertainment
Plotting Diversion in Fielding’s Tom Jones
Interest and Audience Response
Diversionary Reading and the Rhetoric of Fiction
“The Soul of Reading”: Conclusion by Way of Animadversion
Shandean Digression and the Ends of Diversion
The Review of English Studies, 2015
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2012
Although Elias Brand contributes only one letter to the first edition of Clarissa, and three lett... more Although Elias Brand contributes only one letter to the first edition of Clarissa, and three letters to the revised third edition of 1751, he is considered by Samuel Richardson important enough to include in his list of the "Principal Characters." This article accounts for Brand's complicated role by analyzing in detail the meaning of the forty-five quotations punctuating his letters, as well as the manner in which he quotes his tags and texts. Brand's marshalling of spurious evidence against Clarissa and his habit of quoting authors as authorities suggests that the latter may be a key to the credibility of the former. Brand repre sents himself as a confirmed "Ancient," but taking the pedant at his own word is dangerous because of the extent of his surprising debt to the British "Moderns" and to the seventeenth-century Oxford scholar and Anglo-Latin poet, John Owen. This article concludes that Brand's letters are thematic and structurally integral to a novel that is, in many ways, about the consequences of right and wrong reading.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2009
Drawing attention to the complex reciprocal relationship between commercialized leisure and comme... more Drawing attention to the complex reciprocal relationship between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the so-called "Age of Wit," this essay reconceives of the witty and witless in two important ways. Taking for granted, first of all, that wit is usually analyzed in terms of the efficacy of verbal language, the essay examines how and why debates concerning true and false wit were played out in physical terms-in this case, through the motions, gestures, and attitudes of the dancing body. Second of all, the essay attempts to account for the enduring, if unwitting, attractions of " false wit" by likening it to the tricks and transformations of contemporary English pantomime. Satirists of the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s frequently invoke the unmeaning motion of Harlequin as a visual way of proscribing the verbal excesses of extravagant language. At the same time, apologists for pantomime associate Harlequin's "dumb Wit" with truth, reason, and the pattern of nature, claiming that the genre's corporeality allowed it to transcend the limitations and equivocations of words. The essay concludes that the popularity of pantomime contextualizes the Augustan reaction against false wit, in that it identifies a source of aesthetic pleasure in the public's eagerness to be duped by apparent sameness in difference. Early eighteenth-century readers enjoy luxuriant, illogical, and mixed metaphors, forced similes, and trifling jibes and quibbles for the same reason that early eighteenth-century spectators delight in the unexpected turns of pantomimic entertainment: in a world under the sway of Harlequin's magical slapstick, audiences derive satisfaction from being deceived. X 52 X the journal for early modern cultur al studies 9.2
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2005
Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2004
Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 356: Eighteenth-Century Literary Scholars and Critics, 2010
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2014
The Review of English Studies, 2012
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012
The Review of English Studies, 2008
Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned... more Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned in his own time as a prolific and highly successful dramatist. Among his most popular plays was The Tragedy of Tragedies: Or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb, one of the most extraordinary parodies in English theater. The print version of the play incorporates, in an elaborate structure of annotations, a remarkable satire of heroic drama and of the pretensions and excesses of "false scholarship."
This edition includes the text of the play itself and the text of the extraordinary notes (by Fielding's pseudonym "H. Scriblerus Secundus"), appearing in facing page layout; extensive explanatory notes for the modern reader appear at the bottom of the page. Also included are a substantial introduction and a wide range of background materials that set the work in the context of its time. These contextual materials include contemporary reviews, excerpts from the plays that Fielding's parody most frequently targeted, and selections from works that provided inspiration for The Tragedy of Tragedies—from contemporary versions of the "Tom Thumb" folktale to satirical writing by authors such as Alexander Pope, John Gay, and George Villiers.
Comments:
"Featuring an excellent introduction, extensive notes and a generous sampling of contextual materials, this splendid new classroom edition of Henry Fielding's The Tragedy of Tragedies makes one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century come alive for today's students. It will be useful to teachers of eighteenth-century British literature as well as of drama or theatre surveys." – Albert J. Rivero, Marquette University
"Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies provides a master comedian's compact compendium of the heterogeneous sources of laughter and comic insight: farcical action and burlesque situations; literary parody; satire of bombast and pedantry; physical and verbal incongruities (a miniature hero and giant queen, diction that regularly plummets from lofty to low); mind-bending philosophical puzzles (a ghost threatened with death by sword); temporal inversions (footnotes asserting that lines from earlier plays have been cribbed from this one); reductions of poetic form ("Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh"); and the bathos of compression and acceleration (seven stabbing deaths within ten lines at the play's close). The Broadview edition makes the play's full array of comic techniques readily accessible to any reader: effectively edited and cleverly formatted as a facing-page edition, with Fielding's mock-scholarly footnotes filling right-hand pages, the edition would serve equally well as the basis for uproariously funny stage productions and for study as a revealing print artifact from the Augustan Age. I recommend this edition as required reading for courses on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, The Age of Swift and Pope, theater history, eighteenth-century literature, book history, and literary theory—and as pleasure reading for anyone interested in drama, the novel, or a good laugh." – Jill Campbell, Yale University
Table of Contents:
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Tragedy of Tragedies: or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great
IN CONTEXT:
I. Sources and Satiric Models
From The Famous History of Tom Thumb (1750)
From George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1672)
From William Wagstaffe, A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb (1711)
From John Gay, The What D'Ye Call It: A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce (1715)
From Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
From Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous: Or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728)
From Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum (1729)
From James Ralph, The Touch-Stone: Or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town (1728)
From Henry Fielding, Tom Thumb. A Tragedy.…Written by Scriblerus Secundus (1730)
II. "Acting Play" to "Reading Play": Performance, Print, Parody
From John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards and "Of Heroic Plays: An Essay" (1672)
From John Dryden, All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost (1678)
From Thesaurus Dramaticus. Containing all the Celebrated Passages, Soliloquies, Similes, Descriptions, and Other Poetical Beauties in the Body of English Plays, Ancient and Modern, Digested Under Proper Topics (1724)
From James Thomson, The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1730)
III. Reception
From Advertisements in Contemporary Periodicals (1731)
From London Evening Post (18–20 March 1731)
From Daily Post (19 March 1731)
From Daily Post (22 March 1731)
From Daily Post (28 April 1731)
From The Universal Spectator (10 April 1731)
From The Grub-Street Journal (18 November 1731)
From William Hatchett and Eliza Haywood,The Opera of Operas; Or, Tom Thumb the Great. Altered from The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. And Set to Musick after the Italian Manner (1733)
From Observations on the Present Taste for Poetry (1739)
From Giles Jacob, The Mirrour: Or, Satyrical, Panegyrical, Serious, and Humorous on the Present Times (1733)
From Samuel Foote, Taste. A Comedy of Two Acts (1752)
From David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica: Or, A Companion to the Playhouse (1764)
From William Hazlitt, "Of the Comic Writers of the Last Century" (1819)
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
Samuel Richardson in Context
Eighteenth-Century Life, 2018
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760
The Review of English Studies, 2015
The Review of English Studies, 2007
Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 11, 2023
The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760, 2016
The Review of English Studies, 2012
Eighteenth-Century Studies