English 300L

This volume documents the literary controversy and debate over Samuel Richardson's novel, "Pamela", published in 1741. It brings together and reprints key sources within the debate, including artists such as Francis Hayman, Hubert Gravelot, Joseph Highmore and Philip Mercer.

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 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.

Before E. M. Forster's Maurice, written in 1914, introduced a new openness about the favorable depiction of homosexuality in English fiction, a number of novels and stories carried coded portraits of homosexuals and homosexuality. Many of these were, by necessity, published privately; still others were written to insure that the homosexual component would be recognizable to a select few; still others embedded homosexual content within such "safe" genres as the Western and the public school novel. There have been several recent anthologies of twentieth-century gay fiction, but David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's fascinating book is the first to explore the texts that circulated before the "gay fiction" genre came into being, and before greater tolerance allowed writers to treat homosexual themes directly. Leavitt and Mitchell include extracts from stories and novels by well-known writers such as Herman Melville, Walter Pater, Henry James, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as work from neglected figures such as Count Eric Stenbock, John Francis Bloxam, "Alan Dale," and Gerald Hamilton -- the inspiration for Christopher Isherwood's Mr. Norris. The result is an entertaining and revelatory anthology, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the literary treatment of homosexuality.

A selection of essays providing a broad range of critical approaches encouraging students and teachers of the novel to consider it from a variety of points of view.

This volume is the first of six that will present in their entirety Frances Burney's journals and letters from 17 July 1786, when she assumed the position of Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, until 7 July 1791, when she resigned her position because of ill health. Burney's later journalshave been edited as The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay), 1791-1840 (12 vols., 1972-84). Her earlier journals have been edited as The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (4 vols. to date, 1988- ). The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney continues the modernediting of Burney's surviving journals and letters, from 1768 until her death in 1840.The only previous edition of the Court journals and letters is the Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay, edited by Burney's niece Charlotte Barrett and published by Henry Colburn in seven volumes, 1842-46. Barrett's edition, however, is heavily abridged. For the Court years, it excludes about halfof the extant material, which will be printed in the present volumes for the first time. In addition, Barrett made no attempt to recover the thousands of lines obliterated by Burney in the Court journals and letters, and indeed added many further deletions of her own. Barrett's edition wassubsequently revised by Austin Dobson in a six-volume edition, 1904-05, containing new annotations and illustrations, but no alterations to the text.The present edition includes every extant letter that Burney wrote during her five years at Court, as well as all of her copious journals. The elderly Madame d'Arblay attempted to edit her own journals and letters, making numerous changes that would, she believed, make them fitter for publication.This edition aims to restore the manuscripts, as far as possible, to their original state. It recovers the words, lines, and entire passages that Madame d'Arblay strove to conceal and it contains a comprehensive commentary on the text.

Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney's Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney's four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer. It describes Burney's eluding the major modern-isms through which critics have tried to read her: Feminism (with its "gendering" of beauty and reversal of gender roles); Capitalism and its Marxist critique (here the details of Burney's housekeeping become important); Professionalism (as a response to status inconsistency and class conflict); and Ian Watt's "Formal Realism" (Burney perhaps saved the novel from a sharp decline it suffered in the 1770s, even as she tried to distance herself from the genre). Burney's most successful writing appeared before the coining of "ideology." But her standing "prior to ideology" is not a matter of chronological accident. Rather, she quietly but forcefully resisted shared explanations--domesticity as model for household management, debt as basis for family finance, professional status as a means to social confidence, the novel as the dominant literary genre--that became popular during her long and eventful life. Frederic Jameson has described Paul de Man, "in private conversation," claiming, "Marxism . . . has no way of understanding the eighteenth century." Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology conjoins Burney's "eighteenth-centuryness" with her modernity.

When nineteen-year-old Matthew Lewis crafted The Monk in 1796, he had no idea what hideous progeny he had created. The text plagued Lewis throughout his life to the point where he earned the nickname "Monk" Lewis, symbolic of criticism he and the text received equating Lewis directly with the ideas in his infamous gothic novel. The Monk rose to the pinnacle of popularity in an England consumed by its love for Gothic romances and enswathed in the language of political, social, and religious turmoil. In addition, Lewis's novel has endured centuries of criticism to become part of the twenty-first century's love affair with the Gothic. Elements in Lewis's novel have spoken to humankind across the ages, primarily through his principle character, the fallen monk, Ambrosio. Why do The Monk and Ambrosio enwrap imaginations in the dichotomy between appeal and repulsion? What does Ambrosio experience in his mental and physical Lifeworlds as he catapults himself into damnation in the text, and what can humankind appropriate from his fall? This book takes a new approach to literary studies of The Monk by turning hermeneutic phenomenology in a new direction - into the minds of the characters themselves. The reader enters the mind of Ambrosio and experience the world and the symbols surrounding him, including his intersubjective constitution with other characters, as he experiences them. While applying phenomenology to a fictive text is not new, focusing hermeneutic phenomenology exclusively on the consciousness of the characters in a literary text is. The author takes this bold step thoughtfully and analytically, explaining step by step how Ambrosio takes himself down a path to damnation in his own consciousness before Satan ever throws him off of a mountain, in effect explaining how salvation for Ambrosio is impossible by the end of the novel. While previous approaches have analyzed the reader's experience through the lens of phenomenology, this work examines a character's experience through the lens of hermeneutic-phenomenology, analyzing symbols present in the monk's consciousness and how they affect his mental path to damnation, as opposed to analyzing the reader's experience through that same lens. By moving a layer deeper than traditional approaches, this work opens new realms of possibility in literary criticism.

Now available again in paperback, this provocative study by Robert Miles uses the tools of modern literary theory and criticism to analyse this very distinctive body of texts. Miles introduces the reader to contexts of Gothic in the eigteenth century including its historical development and its placement within the period's concerns with discourse and gender.By using texts ranging from sensational novels such as The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho, poetic variations on Gothic by Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, to satirical works on the theme by Jane Austen, Miles presents an intriguing overview of Gothic literature. By drawing extensively on the ideas of Michel Foucault to establish a genealogy he brings Gothic writing in from the margins of 'popular fiction', resituating it at the centre of debate about Romanticism.