Genre Maketh Dog?

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Mirjam Haas ◽  
Leonie Kirchhoff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Objective Observer ◽  
History Of

In The New Biography, Virginia Woolf notes that there is a paradox inherent to the genre of biography, i. e. that of »truth« and »personality«. »[P]ersonality«, she argues further, can only be truly conveyed through aesthetic selection and manipulation of the facts of a life, through fiction. Animal biography challenges both of these categories: what is a true dog character and how close can an author come to a life-like depiction of it? Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) as well as the earliest English example of animal biography, Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little or The Life and Adventures of a Lap Dog (1751), are, in their own way, concerned with this issue. Influenced by their generic predecessors, the texts explore the narratological possibilities which an animal biography can offer, from satirical purposes to aesthetic objectives, from mere functionalisation to sentient animals. Woolf is essentially affected by contemporary discussions of biography and the challenges imposed by creating a dog »personality«. This is fundamental for the depiction of Flush as having an individual (anthropomorphised) character, rather than being depicted as a mere, and changeable type. Pompey the Little, in contrast, serves as a mostly silent and apparently objective observer of society, who, by watching and imitating his masters’ manners, offers eighteenth-century society a ruthlessly unembellished look into the mirror. Consequently, his animal character is, for satirical purposes, reduced to a mere type rather than a complex, not to mention »truth[ful]«, depiction of a nonhuman character. In this paper, we argue that genre expectations interact with two further aspects, i.e. literary history and historical as well as philosophical developments, and all three decisively influence how the two texts understand and relate human as well as non-human experience.

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

Toward an Abolitionist Literary History of the Police

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Broken Windows ◽  
Neighborhood Safety ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modes Of Thought

This coda presents a reading of George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson's enormously influential article “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” (1982) as a remarkably politically successful redeployment of the tropes of eighteenth-century vagrancy. This article both draws on and occludes the prehistory of the police. Kelling and Wilson rely significantly on early histories of policing — in particular, the history of vagrancy law. At the same time, they push their readers insistently away from historical modes of thought. Through a reading of this text, much of whose political influence relies on the persuasive success of its master metaphors, the chapter proposes that reading methods of literary history can offer unique critical insights into the deep histories still animating contemporary theorizations of policing.

A Literary History of Spain: The Eighteenth Century.

1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 376
Author(s):  
Theodore A. Sackett ◽  
Nigel Glendinning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
History Of
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