British Literature 1640-1789 A Critical Reader

by DeMaria, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780631197393
• ISBN10: 0631197397
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-28
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Designed to complement DeMaria's textbook British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology, this critical reader contains seventeen essays by sixteen contemporary literary critics and covers the full range of works printed in the anthology. All the essays were first published within the last ten years, and they represent current thinking about the literature in this chronological span. The Reader will help students and teachers of the period find new approaches to central canonical works, but it also provides introductions to several of the less well known writers included in DeMaria's anthology. Most of the essays in the reader articulate readings of important individual works while situating those works in historical contexts that provide background for understanding other writings of the period. Many of the essays also relate the contexts under study to larger historical or cultural movements. For example, David Norbrook's essay provides a historically - based reading of Milton's Areopagitica while making a contribution to the history of censorship and the evolution of the public sphere in England. Similarly, Catherine Gallagher's essay on Aphra Behn's Oroonoko explains how blackness of the novella's main character functions in literary terms while providing background. Other essays throw light on such topics as the history of readers and authors; social definitions of sexuality; religious thought; nationhood; and the relations between public politics and the private, gendered self. The critics selected for the reader are all currently very active, and many are young scholars whose work has begun to appear in only the last five or ten years: Sharon Achinstein, Helen Deutsch, George Haggerty, Adam Potkay, Carol Barash, D. N. DeLuna, and Frans De Bruyn join more senior established scholars such as Ruth Perry, Terry Castle, David Perkins, Howard Weinbrot, Claude Rawson, and Thomas Greene.

Author Biography

Robert DeMaria Jr is Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He is the author of British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology in Blackwell's Anthologies series and The Life of Samuel Johnson (1993) in Blackwell's Critical Biography series, and of several other books, including Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986).

Table of Contents

A Note on the Form of Reference	vii	(1)
Notes on Contributors	viii	(3)
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
1 Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere	13	(27)
DAVID NORBROOK
2 Milton and the Fit Reader	40	(29)
SHARON ACHINSTEIN
3 The Balance of Power in Marvell's "Horatian Ode"	69	(17)
THOMAS M. GREENE
4 Oroonoko's Blackness	86	(19)
CATHERINE GALLAGHER
5 Lordly Accents: Rochester's Satire	105	(9)
CLAUDE RAWSON
6 Dryden's "Anne Killigrew": Towards a New Pindaric Political Ode	114	(12)
HOWARD WEINBROT
7 Ironic Monologue and "Scandalous Ambo-dexter Conformity" in Defoe's The Shortest Way with the Dissenters	126	(16)
D.N. DELUNA
8 Strange Complicities: Atheism and Conspiracy in A Tale of A Tub	142	(27)
ROGER D. LUND
9 The Rape of the Lock as Miniature Epic	169	(17)
HELEN DEUTSCH
10 Anne Finch: Gender, Politics, and Myths of the Private Self	186	(18)
CAROL BARASH
11 The Spirit of Ending in Johnson and Hume	204	(14)
ADAM POTKAY
12 Mary Leapor Laughs at the Fathers: Reading "Crumble-Hall"	218	(15)
DONNA LANDRY
13 O Lachrymarum Fons: Tears, Poetry, and Desire in Gray	233	(18)
GEORGE E. HAGGERTY
14 The Culture of Travesty: Sexuality and Masquerade in Eighteenth-Century England	251	(20)
TERRY CASTLE
15 Theater and Counter-Theater in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France	271	(16)
FRANS DE BRUYN
16 Cowper's Hares	287	(15)
DAVID PERKINS
17 Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England	302	(31)
RUTH PERRY
18 Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton	333	(15)
CLAUDE RAWSON
Select Bibliography	348	(19)
Index	367