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Recent Essays by Thomas Keymer

Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (Huntingon Library / University of California Press, 2014), 71-87, Sep 1, 2014

“Johnson’s Poetry of Repetition” combines formal and historical criticism to suggest how Johnson ... more “Johnson’s Poetry of Repetition” combines formal and historical criticism to suggest how Johnson cleverly takes poetic clichés and turns them into new images, insights, and perspectives. We now know more about Johnson’s relationship to the poetic idioms and developments within his own moment. He disparaged several innovative contemporaries, but his verse was colored by the new expressive resources they developed. He gives dead poetic language new life.

Frans de Bruyn and Shaun Regan (eds), The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 119-46, Apr 2014

Part 2 of The Culture of the Seven Years’ War extends the volume's focus on printed texts by cons... more Part 2 of The Culture of the Seven Years’ War extends the volume's focus on printed texts by considering literary responses to the war and the contest's bearing on literature itself. The section begins with Thomas Keymer's wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between "arts" and "arms" in Britain from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. Charting the development of the "paper wars" that punctuated literary culture throughout the period, the essay detects an increasingly combative, bellicose aspect to the literary sphere of the mid-eighteenth century. At the same time, in the works of writers such as James Macpherson, Laurence Sterne, and Christopher Smart, Keymer also discerns a distinctive, if sometimes oblique, literature of war that incorporated troubled reflections on both the jingoistic tenor and the human toll of the conflict. No writer was exempt from the cultural battlefield.

Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson (eds), New Directions in the History of the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17-49, Mar 2014

New Directions in the History of the Novel begin with material history and with what Thomas Keyme... more New Directions in the History of the Novel begin with material history and with what Thomas Keymer, in his opening chapter, calls the bookness of books. Was the novelty of the novel-form as much a matter of typography and layout as of storytelling technique? How far does the novel’s ability to give a transparent window on a fictional world depend on the typographic convention – virtually unknown before the eighteenth century – of the uncluttered page? Keymer’s chapter uses a range of examples from the century leading up to Tristram Shandy (1759–67) to examine how the physical forms of the book carry meanings and effects that contribute to the rhetoric of fiction (to borrow Wayne C. Booth’s phrase) and influence the act of interpretation. Authors as well as publishers and printers combine linguistic codes with bibliographical codes to manipulate meaning.

Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds), The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 3: 159-73, Feb 2014

Provides the most inclusive and far-reaching overview of British literature from 700-2000, across four volumes and over 100 chapters
Discusses the historical, social, political, domestic, linguistic, institutional and material contexts in which British literature has been produced
Written by an internationally diverse range of expert contributors including both distinguished academics and up-and-coming young stars
Joins readings across geographical, cultural, institutional, economic and mediological contextsDemonstrates to students and teachers alike a wide range of possible approaches to the study of British literature
A general index and a thematic table of contents enable readers to navigate the development of British Literature

Min Wild and Noel Chevalier (eds), Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century: By Succession of Delight (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 227-32, Sep 2013

Poet, essayist, actor, hymn-writer, wit, magazine editor, transvestite stage performer: Christoph... more Poet, essayist, actor, hymn-writer, wit, magazine editor, transvestite stage performer: Christopher Smart, Georgian don-turned-writer, was all of these. He was, and remains, a mercurial individual, an idiosyncratic yet strangely familiar writer of spiritual heights and material depths. His paradoxical exuberance fascinates scholars of eighteenth-century culture, and this collection of essays, a snapshot of current scholarship from both new and established Smart scholars, offers, among others, literary, theological, dramatic and philosophical perspectives on his writing. Here are new ways of reading familiar Smart works — including the astonishing, devout poem of his incarceration, Jubilate Agno — and unfamiliar ones, such as his translations and writing for children. Unexpected readers of Smart, from Coleridge to a testy anonymous annotator, are examined, and Smart's sacred translations and profane stage presence each find a place. Tom Keymer's re-evaluating afterword finds the quality of “betweenness” in Smart's work: between eras, between genres, between forms, Smart's vitality demands reassessment for each new generation of readers.
Contributors: Karina Williamson, Min Wild, Rosalind Powell, Fraser Easton, Clement Hawes, William E. Levine, Noel Chevalier, Lori A. Branch, Daniel J. Ennis, Chris Mounsey, Debbie Welham, Tom Keymer.

Janet Todd (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1-14, Feb 2013

Named in many surveys as Britain's best-loved work of fiction, Pride and Prejudice is now a globa... more Named in many surveys as Britain's best-loved work of fiction, Pride and Prejudice is now a global brand, with film and television adaptations making Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy household names. With a combination of original readings and factual background information, this Companion investigates some of the sources of the novel's power. It explores key themes and topics in detail: money, land, characters and style. The history of the book's composition and first publication is set out, both in individual essays and in the section of chronology. Chapters on the critical reception, adaptations and cult of the novel reveal why it has become an enduing classic with a unique and timeless appeal.
Marking the 200th anniversary of the first publication
Written for the general reader as well as for students and researchers
Includes much factual information on the novel's history and reception as well as fresh readings of key themes

The Eighteenth-Century Novel 6-7 (2009), Special Double Number: Essays in Honor of John Richetti, 159-96, 2009

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.2 (2005), 183-206, 2005

in Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill (eds), From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 79-96, 1998

Durham University Journal 57.2 (1995), 269-77, 1995

LRB Articles by Thomas Keymer

London Review of Books, Apr 17, 2014

London Review of Books, May 9, 2013

London Review of Books, Jan 3, 2013

London Review of Books, Aug 2, 2012

London Review of Books, Nov 20, 2008

London Review of Books, Dec 13, 2007

Books by Thomas Keymer

Best known today for the innovative satire and experimental narrative of Tristram Shandy (1759–67... more Best known today for the innovative satire and experimental narrative of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Laurence Sterne was no less famous in his time for A Sentimental Journey (1768) and for his controversial sermons. Sterne spent much of his life as an obscure clergyman in rural Yorkshire. But he brilliantly exploited the sensation achieved with the first instalment of Tristram Shandy to become, by his death in 1768, a fashionable celebrity across Europe. In this Companion, specially commissioned essays by leading scholars provide an authoritative and accessible guide to Sterne's writings in their historical and cultural context. Exploring key issues in his work, including sentimentalism, national identity, gender, print culture and visual culture, as well as his subsequent influence on a range of important literary movements and modes, the book offers a comprehensive new account of Sterne's life and work.

Features new essays by acknowledged experts in the field
Explores all of Sterne's writings beyond the most read Tristram Shandy
Includes a detailed guide to further reading and chronology

Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot (Huntingon Library / University of California Press, 2014), 71-87, Sep 1, 2014

Frans de Bruyn and Shaun Regan (eds), The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 119-46, Apr 2014

Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson (eds), New Directions in the History of the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17-49, Mar 2014

Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds), The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 3: 159-73, Feb 2014

Min Wild and Noel Chevalier (eds), Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century: By Succession of Delight (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 227-32, Sep 2013

Janet Todd (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1-14, Feb 2013

The Eighteenth-Century Novel 6-7 (2009), Special Double Number: Essays in Honor of John Richetti, 159-96, 2009

Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.2 (2005), 183-206, 2005

in Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill (eds), From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 79-96, 1998

Durham University Journal 57.2 (1995), 269-77, 1995

London Review of Books, Apr 17, 2014

London Review of Books, May 9, 2013

London Review of Books, Jan 3, 2013

London Review of Books, Aug 2, 2012

London Review of Books, Nov 20, 2008

London Review of Books, Dec 13, 2007

Features new essays by acknowledged experts in the field
Explores all of Sterne's writings beyond the most read Tristram Shandy
Includes a detailed guide to further reading and chronology

Introduces key critical approaches by presenting a careful selection of important and illumin... more Introduces key critical approaches by presenting a careful selection of important and illuminating essays on the novel
Includes historical information, reception analysis, and selected further readings
Makes essays hitherto inaccessible to anyone outside of academia available to the general public

The responsiveness of Sterne's writing to a wide range of approaches and topics of recent and ongoing interest—among them narrative, interpretation, intertextuality, gender, the body, sentimentalism, and print culture—has ensured a wealth of recent activity in the journals. Two specialist periodicals, the Shandean and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, have become major repositories for innovative work on Sterne since their foundation in the late 1980s, and important new readings continue to appear in the established journals. The proliferation of periodical articles means, in turn, access to the full range of this material is now a problem in all but the largest institutions. This situation creates a major opportunity for a volume designed to reprint the best essays of the last fifteen years. The book is divided into five sections. Section one looks at one of the most contentious recent debates about Tristram Shandy, on the issue of generic definition, and is designed to help students orient themselves in their encounters with this convention-breaking text in terms of prior traditions and intertexts. Section two's essays on print culture represent a major new area of interest in literary study as a whole. In this context "print culture" denotes not only Sterne's experimental deformation of typographical resources in Tristram Shandy (the black, marbled, and blank pages being the famous instances) but also his engagement with a literary marketplace in which reviewers and other readers could influence the text as it serially emerged. Section three focuses on topics about the body in Sterne. These essays, related closely to the essays in section four, go beyond run of the mill "body in literature" criticism by linking the topic to other issues of current interest: narrative, language, and scientific discourse and/or medical practices in the period. Political readings, another growth area in recent years, is the subject of the final, fifth section.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a land... more Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) is often regarded as the first true novel in English and a landmark in literary history. The best-selling novel of its time, it provoked a swarm of responses: panegyrics and critiques, parodies and burlesques, piracies and sequels, comedies and operas. The controversy it inspired has become a standard point of reference in studies of the rise of the novel, the history of the book and the emergence of consumer culture. In the first book-length study of the Pamela controversy since 1960, Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor offer a fresh and definitive account of the novel's enormous cultural impact. Above all, they read the controversy as a market phenomenon, in which the writers and publishers involved were competing not only in struggles of interpretation and meaning but also in the larger and more pressing enterprise of selling print.

Major new account of a landmark literary controversy of the eighteenth century
Compelling case study in the rise of the novel genre and the emergence of the marketplace for print
Full of new discoveries and research - the definitive account of this important development for the novel

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Reviews & endorsements

'This excellent book derives from Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor's previous joint work - The 'Pamela' Controversy … Providing a wealth of new information in a crisp, witty narrative, it goes far beyond the previous commentaries on the subject of Pamela as a phenomenon of the commercial marketplace. …this book's dazzling command of historical evidence renders in depth the whole complex dynamics of eighteenth-century cultural production' Modern Language Review

' … a lively and informative analysis … admirable and enjoyable …' Notes and Queries

Offering an introduction to British literature challenging traditional eighteenth-century and Rom... more Offering an introduction to British literature challenging traditional eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, this Companion explores the development of literary genres and modes in a period of rapid change. Its contributors demonstrate how literature was influenced by such historical factors as the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. Linking established authors with those gaining new attention from scholars, the collection's broad scope makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.

Offers unique and valuable overview bridging two important literary periods
Covers a wide range of topics and writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld and Austen
Accessibly written and comprehensive collection for students and scholars

Written as a collection of letters in which very different accounts of the action are unsupervise... more 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.

Reassesses Richardson's purpose of writing Clarissa in an epistolary style
Draws on the documented response to the first three installments of Clarissa

One of the strangest and most unforgettable eighteenth-century novels, Vathek's tale of the Calip... more One of the strangest and most unforgettable eighteenth-century novels, Vathek's tale of the Caliph's obsessive quest for knowledge, and his eternal damnation, is a wild Gothic fantasy whose sensuous imagination and grotesque comedy have inspired writers from Byron to Lovecraft.
New introduction by Thomas Keymer pays special attention to the novel's literary qualities, its hybrid nature and its connections with oriental fiction and the Gothic, in a culturally broad context, as well as to its origins and Beckford's scandalous public persona.
Includes selections from the important original annotations in the lifetime editions of 1786 and 1816 as well as new modern notes.
Comprehensive bibliography.
The most critically up-to-date and accessible edition, and a founding text of modern fantasy literature.

New to this edition

Introduction by Thomas Keymer.
New, fuller notes.
Up-to-date bibliography.
New chronology of the author.
Reset text.

'Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant; and to undertake that which surpasseth his power!'

The Caliph Vathek is dissolute and debauched, and hungry for knowledge. When the mysterious Giaour offers him boundless treasure and unrivalled power he is willing to sacrifice his god, the lives of innocent children, and his own soul to satisfy his obsession. Vathek's extraordinary journey to the subterranean palace of Eblis, and the terrifying fate that there awaits him, is a captivating tale of magic and oriental fantasy, sudden violence and corrupted love, whose mix of moral fable, grotesque comedy, and evocative beauty defies classification. Originally written by Beckford in French at the age of only 21, its dreamlike qualities have influenced writers from Byron to H. P. Lovecraft.

This new edition reprints Beckford's authorized English text of 1816 with its elaborate and entertaining notes. In his new introduction Thomas Keymer examines the novel's relations to a range of literary genres and cultural contexts.

An established classic, often compared to Voltaire's Candide, Rasselas is perhaps its author'... more An established classic, often compared to Voltaire's Candide, Rasselas is perhaps its author's most creative work, here presented in a sparkling new edition.
Authoritative introduction by Thomas Keymer relating the story to Johnson's life, thought, and writings; the rise of the novel genre; philosophical scepticism of the Enlightenment period; literary orientalism; society and the global context of the Seven Years War.
Authoritative text incorporating Johnson's revisions to the second edition, newly typeset.
Up-to-date bibliography.
Extensive explanatory annotation based on original research and relating the novel to its literary, philosophical, and political contexts.

New to this edition

Introduction by Thomas Keymer, leading eighteenth-century scholar.
Up-to-date bibliography.
Explanatory Notes based on original research.
Authoritative text completely re-set.

'What then is to be done? said Rasselas; the more we inquire, the less we can resolve.'

Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the 'happy valley' in order to make their 'choice of life'. By witnessing the misfortunes and miseries of others they may come to understand the nature of happiness, and value it more highly. Their travels and enquiries raise important practical and philosophical questions concerning many aspects of the human condition, including the business of a poet, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and how to find contentment. Johnson's adaptation of the popular oriental tale displays his usual wit and perceptiveness; sceptical and probing, his tale nevertheless suggests that wisdom and self-knowledge need not be entirely beyond reach.

This new edition relates the novel to Johnson's life and thought and to politics, society, and the global context of the Seven Years War.

New edition of Defoe's masterpiece, using the authoritative text, based with emendations on t... more New edition of Defoe's masterpiece, using the authoritative text, based with emendations on the first edition and incorporating new critical introduction by Thomas Keymer and the most substantial editorial apparatus of any comparable edition.
The introduction ranges widely across literary and historical contexts, from the religious to the post-colonial, with a lively examination of this classic text by a leading scholar.
Full notes including new material resulting from recent scholarship.
Up to date bibliography.
Textual notes and glossary.
Two interesting appendixes: a chronology of the action of the story and the preface to Defoe's second sequel (Serious Reflections...) published the year after the novel, and which throws up ways of reading the book as allegorized autobiography.

New to this edition

Introduction by Thomas Keymer.
Much fuller notes by Thomas Keymer and James Kelly
Up to date bibliography.
Glossary.
Chronology of the action of the story
Appendix: Preface to Defoe's Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

'I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life...I likewise taught him to say Master'

Robinson Crusoe's seafaring adventures are abruptly ended when he is shipwrecked, the solitary survivor on a deserted island. He gradually creates a life for himself, building a house, cultivating the land, and making a companion from the native whose life he saves.

Daniel Defoe's enthralling story-telling and imaginatively detailed descriptions have ensured that his fiction masquerading as fact remains one of the most famous stories in English literature. On one level a simple adventure story, the novel also raises profound questions about moral and spiritual values, society, and man's abiding acquisitiveness. This new edition includes a scintillating Introduction and notes that illuminate the historical context.

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones i... more A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighbouring squire – though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. But when his amorous escapades earn the disapproval of his benefactor, Tom is banished to make his own fortune. Sophia, meanwhile, is determined to avoid an arranged marriage to Allworthy’s scheming nephew and escapes from her rambunctious father to follow Tom to London. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, Tom Jones (1749) is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.

In his introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition, Thomas Keymer discusses narrative techniques and themes, the context of eighteenth-century fiction and satire, and the historical and political background of the Jacobite Rebellion. This volume also includes a chronology, further reading, notes, a glossary and an appendix on Fielding’s revisions.

'Pamela under the Notion of being a Virtuous Modest Girl will be introduced into all Familes,and ... more 'Pamela under the Notion of being a Virtuous Modest Girl will be introduced into all Familes,and when she gets there, what Scenes does she represent? Why a fine young Gentleman endeavouring to debauch a beautiful young Girl of Sixteen.' (Pamela Censured, 1741)

One of the most spectacular successes of the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world 'into two different Parties, Pamelists and Antipamelists', even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached up for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attempts of her predatory master to seduce her. Written in the voice of its low-born heroine, but by a printer who fifteen years earlier had narrowly escaped imprisonment for the seditious output of his press, Pamela is not only a work of pioneering psychological complexity, but also a compelling and provocative study of power and its abuse.

Based on the original text of 1740, from which Richardson later retreated in a series of defensive revisions, this edition makes available the version of Pamela that aroused such widespread controversy on its first appearance.

‘The introductions to each volume are exemplary. They are well written, and full of information .... more ‘The introductions to each volume are exemplary. They are well written, and full of information ... There is also a masterly chronology … more scholarly care, and even original thought, have been devoted to these volumes than to many similar enterprises of collective reprinting.’
Times Literary Supplement

The Pamela controversy of the early 1740s remains a landmark of literary history. So intense were the Pamela vogue and surrounding quarrels that one contemporary wrote of a world divided into two different Parties, 'Pamelists' and 'Antipamelists', as though even the sensational political developments of the day had somehow been eclipsed. Fuelling the partisanship was the swift entrepreneurial opportunism of the eighteenth-century marketplace. Recommended from the pulpit of a Southwark church, illustrated in the pavilions of Vauxhall Gardens, exhibited in 'a curious piece of waxwork' on a Fleet Street corner, Pamela was everywhere. Parodied and pirated, puffed and censured, versified and dramatized, and appropriated in several spurious continuations as well as Richardson's own authorized sequel, it now makes visible, like nothing else, the heterogeneity, vigour and turmoil of its cultural moment.
As has long been recognized, it also marks a defining moment in the history and formation of the novel as a literary genre. Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) is not only among the most important and influential of English novelists. He also remains, as he was in his own day, one of the most controversial. Criticism of the last two decades has established his novels as key texts for academic debate under a whole range of rubrics, among them psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. Nothing today, however, can match the fierce energy and ideological charge of the controversy that immediately followed the bestselling success of his first novel, Pamela (1740), which ran through six editions in eighteen months. The debate over Pamela and its continuation, in which Richardson himself played a prominent part, involved a fascinating variety of figures: rival novelists such as Henry Fielding and Eliza Haywood, playwrights such as Carlo Goldoni (whose dramatic response to Pamela was translated into English), artists such as Francis Haymand, Hubert Gravelot, Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercier, and a host of lesser critics, poets and dramatists.
This edition brings together for the first time all the key sources for the contemporary debate, reprinting many of them for the first time in two and a half centuries.

New edition by top scholar with contextualizing introduction and updated notes Particula... more New edition by top scholar with contextualizing introduction and updated notes
Particular emphasis on relationship to Richardson's Pamela
Incorporates Fielding' corrections to second edition
Two appendices giving material closely parodied in Shamela

'I beg as soon as you get Fielding's Joseph Andrews, I fear in Ridicule of your Pamela and of Virtue in the Notion of Don Quixote's Manner, you would send it to me by the very first Coach.'

(George Cheyne in a letter to Samuel Richardson, February 1742)

Both Joseph Andrews (1742) and Shamela (1741) were prompted by the success of Richardson's Pamela (1740), of which Shamela is a splendidly bawdy parody. But in Shamela Fielding also demonstrates his concern for the corruption of contemporary society, politics, religion, morality, and taste. The same themes - together with a presentation of love as charity, as friendship, and in its sexual taste - are present in Joseph Andrews, Fielding's first novel. It is a work of considerable literary sophistication and satirical verve, but its appeal lies also in its spirit of comic affirmation, epitomized in the celebrated character of Parson Adams.

This revised and expanded edition follows the text of Joseph Andrews established by Martin C. Battestin for the definitive Wesleyan Edition of Fielding's works. The text of Shamela is based on the first edition, and two substantial appendices reprint the preliminary matter from Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero and the second edition of Richardson's Pamela (both closely parodied in Shamela). A new introduction by Thomas Keymer situates Fielding's works in their critical and historical contexts.

The next series of Clarendon Lectures will be given by Professor Thomas Keymer, Chancellor Jackma... more The next series of Clarendon Lectures will be given by Professor Thomas Keymer, Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, in November 2014. The 2014 series will take place on weeks 5 and 6 of Michaelmas Term: Tuesday 11th November, Thursday 13th November, Tuesday 18th November, and Thursday 20th November. All four lectures will take place in Lecture Theatre 2 in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. They will begin at 5.15pm, and all are welcome.
The theme of the 2014 series is 'Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820'. The individual lectures are entitled:
1. Faint Meaning: Dryden and Restoration Censorship
2. Libels in Hieroglyphicks: Defoe, Pope
3. The Trade of Libelling: Fielding, Johnson
4. Southey’s New Star Chamber

Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 21, 2002

The author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is often seen as an anachronism — either a belated expone... more The author of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is often seen as an anachronism — either a belated exponent of learned-wit satire whose kinship is with Montaigne, or a proto-modernist whose narrative pyrotechnics anticipate Joyce. Yet to many contemporaries Sterne's writing was emphatically of its immediate time, a voguish compound of all things modern that seemed to typify, if not indeed constitute, a ‘Shandy-Age’. This book demonstrates the self-conscious imbrication of Tristram Shandy in the diverse literary culture of its extended moment. Not only absorbing but also updating Swift's Tale of a Tub, Sterne's text turns the satirical resources of Scriblerian writing on the post-Scriblerian literary marketplace, and above all on that quintessentially modern genre, the novel itself. For all its anticipation of later trends, Sterne's play on narrative representation, linguistic indeterminacy, the unruliness of reading, and the materiality of text turns out to be firmly grounded in the conventions and tropes of mid-18th-century fiction. Through the mechanisms of improvisatory serialization and literary intertextuality, he could also engage with other new texts and trends as they continued to emerge, including ‘Nonsense Club’ satire, the Ossianic vogue, and debates about the Seven Years War.

Poetics of the Pillory, 2019

Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French ... more Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control between 1780 and 1820. But control was becoming more difficult in practice, and the consequences for poetry and other literary genres are sometimes overstated at a time when the overwhelming priority for the authorities was cheap (or worse, free) radical print. This chapter surveys key cases of prosecution and/or pillorying across the period (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Walter Cox, William Hone, William Cobbett), and argues that the writers now central to the Romantic canon were relatively unaffected. The striking exception is Robert Southey, whose incendiary Wat Tyler, which embarrassingly emerged at the height of Southey’s Tory pomp two decades later, is newly contextualized and interpreted.

Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 2016

Poetics of the Pillory, 2019

Eighteenth-century cases from Nathaniel Mist and Edmund Curll to John Shebbeare and a printer of ... more Eighteenth-century cases from Nathaniel Mist and Edmund Curll to John Shebbeare and a printer of Wilkes’s North Briton gave rise to a new satirical trope, frequently found in the 1730–80 period, in which the pillory becomes a tool of self-promotion. The marketability of seditious libel is further illustrated by the aftermath of the Stage Licensing Act (1737), which muted opposition drama but in so doing also boosted opposition print. The Champion, Henry Fielding’s first political journal, is a peculiarly powerful instance of this phenomenon, and highlights the ingenuity of Fielding’s play with codes, disguises, and interpretative cues throughout his literary career. Samuel Johnson, another writer who cut his teeth in the satirical campaign against Walpole after the Stage Licensing Act, was still reflecting, as late as the Lives of the Poets (1779–81), on questions arising from that campaign about censorship, authorship, and the book trade.

New Directions in the History of the Novel, 2014

Historians of the novel and theoreticians of narrative rarely comment on a publishing development... more Historians of the novel and theoreticians of narrative rarely comment on a publishing development contemporaneous with the novel’s rise: the relatively sudden supersession of the busy, cluttered page that typifies seventeenth-century book production by the clean, modernised layout that prevails in the eighteenth century. Yet if a primary concern of the realist novel is to give a transparent window on a fictional world, uncomplicated by overt mediating factors, the illusion depends as much on typographic convention as on narrative technique. The first quarter of the eighteenth century saw what one book historian has called a ‘revolution … in the appearance of the printed page’: a revolution that swept away conventions of presentation, including heavy use of rules, decorative borders and marginal apparatus, often with enclosure of text in boxed-rule borders, some of which derive originally from the manuscript codex.2 By reducing or eliminating obtrusive features of this kind, the streamlined page that took hold after 1700, alongside the elegant Franco-Dutch founts introduced by refugee Huguenot printers and made fashionable under William III, visually de-emphasised the materiality of print in ways promoting immediacy of access to literary content. In a poem to celebrate the modernity of Bernard Lintot’s Miscellany (1712), John Gay commented on the clarity not only of the poetic voices assembled by Lintot (Addison, Congreve, Pope, Prior) but also of his typographic style, which rejected the native crudeness of Grubstreet for sleeker continental models.

On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, ‘Engl... more On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, ‘English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government’. It’s certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment—the pillory—that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise co...

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2020

This essay approaches the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 as constituting, by most Enlightenment and m... more This essay approaches the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 as constituting, by most Enlightenment and modern definitions, a civil war, and considers the implications for poems written during or soon after the rising by William Collins, Hester Mulso (later Chapone), Tobias Smollett, and others. Classical tropes of civil war are among the literary features structuring these poems, which often take the form, more specifically, of odes, exploiting the formal capacity of the ode to dramatize internal division. Roman concepts of bellum civile and “Intestine Wars” (Pope’s Pharsalian expression from Windsor-Forest) are obviously to the fore. So, more interestingly, are the Athenian syntagmata recently emphasized by Nicole Loraux and, following her, Giorgio Agamben: stasis emphylos, an internecine conflict particular to the phylon, to lineage or blood kinship; haima homaimon, the murder of a blood relation, literally blood of the same blood; oikeios polemos, war within the household or among kinsm...

A Companion to British Literature, 2014

A Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts... more A Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts and ideas that have shaped and transformed it over the past thirteen centuries. Its four volumes cover literature from all periods and places in Britain and demonstrate the wide variety of approaches to studying the subject. Provides the most inclusive and far-reaching overview of British literature from 700-2000, across four volumes and over 100 chapters Discusses the historical, social, political, domestic, linguistic, institutional and material contexts in which British literature has been produced Written by an internationally diverse range of expert contributors including both distinguished academics and up-and-coming young stars Joins readings across geographical, cultural, institutional, economic and mediological contextsDemonstrates to students and teachers alike a wide range of possible approaches to the study of British literature A general index and a thematic table of contents enable readers to navigate the development of British Literature

The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists

Page 1. -7 3 &amp;#x27;&amp;gt; A CASE 3 C Thomas Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Pa... more Page 1. -7 3 &amp;#x27;&amp;gt; A CASE 3 C Thomas Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Laurence Sterne&amp;#x27;s Tristram Shandy A CASEBOOK This One ZRUU-TDC-W5YO Page 6. CASEBOOKS IN CRITICISM recent tities Chinua Achebe&amp;#x27;s Things ...

XVII-XVIII. Bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 1995

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018

Central to Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity, in which divinely guaranteed truth give... more Central to Charles Taylor’s account of secular modernity, in which divinely guaranteed truth gives way to the personal and human, is ‘the massive subjective turn … in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’. This chapter approaches the ‘subjective turn’ of Romantic literature by way of its philosophical and literary antecedents in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the instability or inscrutability of personal identity as conceived in Hume, Sterne, and the emergent genre of autobiography. The most powerful autobiographies of the Romantic era—if we include such generically complex cases as The Prelude and Biographia Literaria—inherit and develop a Shandean sense of the problematics of their own enterprise. Yet their fascination with the processes of cognition, and more broadly with mental operations, conscious or unconscious, also bears the mark of more recent psychological discourses; they articulate a new sense of subjectivity as constituted by the creativ...

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2005

The creator of Lovelace, the most adroit and beguiling manipulator in eighteenth-century fiction,... more The creator of Lovelace, the most adroit and beguiling manipulator in eighteenth-century fiction, was in his own life unusually susceptible to deception and fraud. In Samuel Richardson's last years, having made compassionate loans totalling £50 to Eusebius Silvester, a feckless attorney he came to regard as a confidence trickster, he sought to retrieve his full correspondence widi Silvester as a memorial of exploited trust. He wished (as he instructed a proxy to tell Silvester)

The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1993

Volume 1: Apparatus Shamela Verse Responses Richardson's Preface, Introduction, and Conclusio... more Volume 1: Apparatus Shamela Verse Responses Richardson's Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion to the second edition (1741) Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741) Richardson's Preface and Conclusion to volumes III and IV (1741) Richardson's Preliminary matter to the octavo edition (1742) Verse Responses: Anon, 'Advice to Booksellers (after reading Pamela)' (1741) Poems from the London Magazine Josiah Relph, 'Wrote after Reading Pamela' (1747) Belinda, 'To the Author of Pamela' (1745) George Bennet, extract from Pamela Versified (1741) Anon, 'Pamela the Second'(1742) J- W-, Pamela: or, The Fair Impostor (1743) Volume 2: Prose Criticism Visual Representations Review from History of the Works of the Learned (1740) Anon, Pamela Censured (1741) Charles Povey, The Virgin in Eden (1741) Abbe Marquet (?), Lettre sure Pamela (1742) Visual Representations: John Carwitham, Engravings from The Life of Pamela (1741) Hubert Gravelot and Frances Hayman, Engravings from the octavo edition (1742) Frances Hayman, 'Pamela Fleeing from Lady Davers' (c. 1741-2) Hubert Gravelot, 'Pamela and the Fortune-Teller' (1740s) Joseph Highmore, Engravings of scenes from Pamela (1745) Robert Feke, 'Pamela Andrews' (early 1740s) Philip Mercier, Three paintings of Pamela (c. 1745-50) Volume 3: Anti-Pamela Memoirs of the Life of Lady H- Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela (1741) Memoirs of the Life of Lady H- (1741) Volumes 4 and 5: Pamela's Conduct in High Life John Kelly, Pamela's Conduct in High Life (1741) Volume 6: Dramatic and Operatic Adaptations Henry Giffard, Pamela. A Comedy (1741) James Dance (?), Pamela or, Virtue Triumphant (1741) Joseph Dorman, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. An Opera (1742) Anon, Mock-Pamela (1750) Carlo Goldoni, Pamela. A Comedy (1750, translated 1756)

Rasselas is the conscious beneficiary of earlier editions, while also developing its own modern f... more Rasselas is the conscious beneficiary of earlier editions, while also developing its own modern focus. Like Chapman and Hardy, it prints the text of the second, corrected edition of 1759 and maintains first-edition readings in some cases of compositional error. It has a chronology, a useful (though obvious) bibliography, and a helpful glossary of unfamiliar words that

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016

London Review of Books, 2013

Times Literary Supplement Tls, 2003