Description

Seeking to honor and extend the critical legacy of Howard Weinbrot, this volume re-examines, rebuilds, and upgrades the most prominent pillars of long eighteenth-century scholarship. The collection is divided into four thematic sections, beginning with a series of chapters offering fresh analyses of Swift, Dryden, Hogarth, and other major authors and artists of the period. In the sections that follow, the contributors not only explore biographies of both highly esteemed figures and notorious deviants, but also investigate the very concept of Enlightenment as it has evolved from the eighteenth century to today. The final section features chapters that probe the complex interaction of identity, persona, and place, traversing the countless locales in which the British—and the international—eighteenth century emerged. The volume ultimately covers a range of experience that extends from the gallows to the landscape garden and from heroic antiquity to Romantic-era France. Juxtaposing the local and particular against the grand and universal, Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment testifies to the complexity and ongoing significance of eighteenth-century culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Place for Genius: Howard Weinbrot and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Kevin L. Cope

Part One: Poised on a Plinth or Perched on a Precipice?: Major Authors
Chapter One: Swift's Lists
J. T. Scanlan
Chapter Two: History, Myth, and Heroism in Dryden's Translation, The Æneis
David Venturo
Chapter Three: Discourses of the Eye: Romeo and Juliet and William Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode
Timothy Erwin

Part Two: Lives: Actual, Engrossed, or Otherwise
Chapter Four: Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Philosophers
Robert DeMaria, Jr.
Chapter Five: Imitation and Biography: Richard Savage and the Misreading of London
Lance Wilcox
Chapter Six: Johnson's Irascibles and the Good Work of Bad Stories
David Wade Nunnery
Chapter Seven: Johnson, Dodd, and the Concentrated Sententia
A. W. Lee

Part Three: Turbulent Times and Edgy Eternity: Conceiving, Building, and Revising the Enlightenment
Chapter Eight: ‘Incipit’: Pope's Beginnings, Original and Revised
Stephen Karian
Chapter Nine: Major, Minor, Marginal, Mummified: The Lost Middle Years of Eighteenth-Century Canon Formation in the Twentieth Century
James Engell
Chapter Ten: ‘Sublunary Particularity’: Religion, Rhetoric, and Difference
Samara Anne Cahill
Chapter Eleven: Stewards of the Lord: Eighteenth-Century Gardeners as Pioneers of Sustainability
Bärbel Czennia

Part Four: Identity, British or Personal: Finding Oneself in the Long Eighteenth Century
Chapter Twelve: Diplomacy, Diversion, and Invention: Sir George Macartney at the Court of Catherine the Great
Greg Clingham
Chapter Thirteen: Johnson and Stendhal: A French Connection
Philip Smallwood
Chapter Fourteen: Samuel Johnson and the Sense of Place
Stephen Clarke
Chapter Fifteen: Some Dreams in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Maximillian E. Novak

Product details

Published 07 May 2024
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 390
ISBN 9781611466034
Imprint Lehigh University Press
Illustrations 10 BW Illustrations
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Kevin L. Cope

Contributor

Stephen Clarke

Contributor

Greg Clingham

Contributor

Kevin L. Cope

Contributor

Bärbel Czennia

Contributor

James Engell

Contributor

Timothy Erwin

Contributor

Stephen Karian

Contributor

A. W. Lee

Contributor

David Nunnery

Contributor

David Venturo

Contributor

Lance Wilcox

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