Civic Humorism and the Eighteenth-Century Periodical Essay

ELH ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Squibbs
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Essay

scholarly journals Johnson and the Eighteenth–Century Periodical Essay: A Corpus–Based Approach

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Brocklebank
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Jonathan Swift ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Keyword Analysis ◽  
Sentence Patterns ◽  
Periodical Essay

The style of Samuel Johnson’s essays for the periodicals The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler is quite different from that of earlier eighteenth–century essayists such as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift. However, despite advances in recent years in corpus–based stylistic approaches to texts, a comparison of these three authors using current corpus–analytic techniques has yet to be attempted. This paper reports on the first stages of such a project. Johnson’s essays are compared with Addison and Swift’s essays using WordSmith Tools 5, and an analysis of keywords, semantic groupings of keywords, and key collocations of keywords in Johnson’s essays are identified. It is argued that a keyword analysis brings to the fore grammatical aspects of Johnsonian sentence patterns and provides empirical support for what have hitherto been only intuitively–based statements regarding his style. Also, further patterns in the data will be identified through a phraseological analysis of the essays focusing on the most common four–word clusters (4–grams) that Johnson uses.

XV.—The Relation of the English “Character” to Its Greek Prototype.

PMLA ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-423
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Periodical Essay

The writing of “Characters” was at the same time one of the most prolific and the most significant phases of literary activity in the seventeenth century. Though many of these books of “Characters” have been forgotten, the titles of over one hundred and fifty are still remembered—enough certainly to show how popular the fashion of such writing was. Furthermore, its significance becomes apparent when we consider what prose fiction owes to it; for, through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century, the old formal “Character” passed into the novel and become a part of it.

V.—The Relation of the Seventeenth Century Character to the Periodical Essay

PMLA ◽  
1904 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-114
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Proper Form ◽  
Periodical Essay ◽  
The Individual

To say that the seventeenth century Character holds an important place in the development of prose fiction is a commonplace of criticism. That it was through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century that it influenced the development of fiction is equally well known. But the Character of the periodical essay, written by men more interested in the individual than in the type, was quite different from the old formal Character of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Through what changes it passed in the course of its development; and why it was through the periodical essay, rather than in its own proper form, that it came to exert the influence it did, are two questions which I shall attempt to answer.

Stories without Plots

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-194
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Judith Sargent Murray ◽  
Philip Freneau ◽  
History Of ◽  
Periodical Essay

This chapter explains how the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical essay describes the modern economy as a complex system. Specifically distinguishing itself from the novel, the periodical (or Addisonian) essay narrates economic causality as multiplex and contingent: economic relations cannot be plotted around individual protagonists. The chapter offers a history of the importance of the periodical essay in American literature, and specifically focuses on the examples of the genre by Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown. Although these writers represent very different ideological positions, they each use the generic affordances of the periodical essay to depict the intricate dependencies that constitute global capitalism. The periodical essay thus presents a belletristic form that functions similarly to Hamilton’s policy writing: speculative fictions that narrate the possible consequences that descend from individual moments of production, exchange, and consumption.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document