scholarly journals “As Fully Incomprehensible as the Northern Lights”: Literary Identities in The Adventures of an Author

Authorship ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Ladd
Keyword(s):  
Original Composition ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Professional Authorship ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Control ◽  
Literary Autobiography

This essay considers an anonymously-written and understudied novel, The Adventures of an Author (1767), as self-consciously reflecting the complexities and multiplicities of professional authorship in the mid-eighteenth century. Containing a vividly-realized fictive print society, this two-volume work revolves around the exploits of a writer-protagonist named Jack Atall who confusedly constructs his own literary autobiography. Investigating The Adventures of an Author as a comic negotiation of developing conceptions of authorship and the book trade, the novel is read as ironically underlining how discussions like Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition and Ralph’s Case of Authors fall short in defining and defending the professional author. It can be argued that Adventures represents the period’s conceptions of authorship as unstable, depicting the chaotic inclusivity of the Republic of Letters and the inability of authorial polemics to contain and control the operations of the literary marketplace.

scholarly journals Afterlives of the Republic of Letters: Learned Journals and Scholarly Community in the Early Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Changing Role

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.

Business of Fiction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Suarez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Book History ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Luxury Products

The eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of print, with annual publications in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland increasing by more than 350 per cent from the first decade to the last. This chapter relates the growth in novel publishing between 1695 and 1774 to population growth and the growth in literacy. Recent research links the book trade keeping prices artificially high to readers’ consumption of novels as luxury products and evidence of social status. This trend is considered, along with remuneration for authors; the market for fiction; Irish reprints; continuations and spin-offs; abridgements and serializations; translations; circulating libraries; and the significance of book history to understanding the emergence and development of the novel.

The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hinds
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Expression

This essay provides an overview of the publishing context at the turn of the eighteenth century out of which the novel would emerge, including the development and early dominance of the London book, before going on to describe the conditions for the spread of printing and bookselling nationally from 1695 onwards. As well as considering book production, the essay examines readers’ experiences in the period, looking at the testimony of individual, historical readers, and some specific genres of writing—such as diaries, autobiographies, and collections of letters—often considered important for the emergence of the novel form. The essay then turns to establish the ‘conceptual horizons’ of readers’ expectations with regard to fiction—horizons which authors could work within or seek to challenge and push further by innovating new forms of literary expression, the novel amongst them.

OPERE E LIBRI DI UN ASTRONOMO CARTOGRAFO DEL XVIII SECOLO: TRA ERUDIZIONE E STATO

Nuncius ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-491
Author(s):  
ANNA GIULIA CAVAGNA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mathematics Teacher ◽  
Technical Skills ◽  
Astronomical Observatory ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Military Engineer ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Military School ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Set Up

Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title Giovanni Giacomo Marinoni (Udine 1676 - Vienna 1755), of humble origins, lived in Italy and Austria as an official of the Empire. In the early Eighteenth century he embarked upon a brillant carreer as a mathematics teacher, a topographer and a military engineer. He set up and run a military school in Vienna, partly financed by the Crown. The curriculum of the school included many new technical skills. As a cartographer and surveying instructor he was in the region of Lombardy where he defended the interests of the Austrians. He built the first Viennese astronomical observatory, again only partly financed by the Crown. He was ennobled and created Imperial counsellor. As an habitue of the Republic of Letters he corresponded with many scholars and became a member of the London, Berlin and Saint Peterburg Academies. He published his own works and owned a rich library.

‘A Religious Attention to Minutiae’: César de Missy (1703–1775) Studies the New Testament

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-202
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Scholarly Activity ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Public Scholarship ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Greek New Testament ◽  
The Republic

“This article offers a portrait of the milieu and scholarly activity of César de Missy, an assiduous and richly connected but hitherto unknown member of the Republic of Letters in eighteenth-century London. De Missy preached at Huguenot churches and collected books, especially bibles: he published little, but left a great deal of scholarship in manuscript, mostly concerned with the readings and codicology of the Greek New Testament. Perhaps his most peculiar and revealing pursuit was the minute study of scribal error in the production of manuscripts, an activity that absorbed his attention far more than its profit might seem to warrant. I argue that De Missy's fixation on the multiple histories of the scriptural text represents a private reaction to loss, turning away from the more conventional public scholarship of the Huguenot diaspora.”

August Tittel (1691–1756): The (Mis)fortunes of an Eighteenth-Century Translator

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-430
Author(s):  
Asaph Ben-Tov
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Republic ◽  
A Minor

August Tittel, a Lutheran pastor, translator, ‘minor author’, and fugitive, was best known to contemporaries for his German translation of Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament Connected and for his turbulent life. Together with his printed oeuvre, Tittel’s extant correspondence, especially with his patron Ernst Salomon Cyprian, allow us a close scrutiny of the life and work of a minor and troublesome member of the Republic of Letters. Despite its peculiarities, there is much in his career which is indicative of broader trends in early eighteenth-century scholarship, e.g. networks of patronage and a German interest in Jansenist and English biblical scholarship, theology, and confessional polemics. This view of the Republic of Letters ‘from below’ sheds light on a class of minor scholars, which often evades the radar of modern scholarship, but was an essential part of the early modern Republic of Letters.

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