The Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-century Representation in Victorian Literary Histories

The domestic sphere increases as a subject for satire in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Literary histories assert satire’s decline after 1750 when creative energy shifts towards home, family, nature, individual subjectivity, and private feelings. But the apparent shift towards representations of domesticity does not simply displace but rather offers new opportunities to satire which insinuates itself into modes of writing almost as soon as they are formed and changes the shape they ultimately assume. In contrast to earlier satires on public figures, from royalty and ministers to prostitutes and Grub Street hacks, domestic satire often focuses on families and households, and on the precarious lives of dependants, servants, spinsters, illegitimate offspring, and other persons of socially ambiguous standing. Satire in an age of rising colonialism, economic competition, class struggle, and industrialization, must look beyond court and coffee-house into the parlour where satire has made itself at home.

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Literary Histories

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199212484.013.0005 ◽

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.

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The Novel and the Sexuality of Vagrancy

Vagrant Figures ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300241310.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 72-115

Author(s):

Sal Nicolazzo

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Print Culture ◽

The Novel ◽

Marriage Plot ◽

Labor Discipline ◽

The Family ◽

Literary Histories ◽

Domestic Lives

This chapter examines the role of vagrancy law in regulating the affective, sexual, reproductive, and domestic lives of the English poor. It traces vagrancy's appearance at the margins of both the novel and the marriage plot across a series of texts, including Jane Barker's Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), and, most centrally, Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746). Fielding, as novelist, magistrate, and major eighteenth-century theorist of police, is at the center of the chapter, which reads his figuration of vagrancy as a kind of sexuality that disrupts labor-discipline, marriage, and legitimate inheritance. At the same time, Fielding's text and the archival records of policing that surround it reveal how one might take vagrancy as a category of analysis for transgender history, since the construction of the sexed body as metonym for juridical identity developed through a nexus of policing, surveillance, and transatlantic print culture for which vagrancy was a foundational legal category. Finally, through readings of Scott's Millenium Hall and Mary Saxby's posthumously published Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (1806), the chapter shows that literary histories of sexuality look profoundly different if one centers the parish rather than the family as the field of analysis.

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Conclusion

Awakening Verse ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197510278.003.0007 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 203-212

Author(s):

Wendy Raphael Roberts

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Religious Experience ◽

Literary History ◽

American Literary History ◽

Religious Radicalism ◽

Literary Histories

Through examples of both print and manuscript poems, the conclusion argues that evangelicalism was a shift in the emphasis on aesthetics and its correct uses more than a theological tenet, and that revival poetry became a central part of not only eighteenth-, but nineteenth-century verse practices and beyond. These legacies, which include the revivalist poet-minister, the print itinerant, espousal piety, the Calvinist couplet, and women poet-minister personae, have important implications for later abolitionist poetry, the sentimental poetess, histories of racialized and gendered aesthetic capacities, the development of lyric address, and the integration of religious experience and practice in American literary history. Though elite defenders of enthusiasm tried to empty enthusiasm of religious radicalism and attach it to literary poetry, the eighteenth century (and beyond) saw the explosion of an enthusiastic poetry explicitly tied to religious revivalism. Ultimately, Roberts argues, literary scholars must grapple with how to write modern literary histories that account for people living with the gods fully present.

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Narrative Fiction in Early Modern Europe

Quaerendo ◽

10.1163/15700690-12341486 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 51 (1-2) ◽

pp. 160-188

Author(s):

Rita Schlusemann ◽

Krystyna Wierzbicka-Trwoga

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Literary History ◽

Narrative Fiction ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Fictional Narrative ◽

European Languages ◽

Modern Europe ◽

Literary Histories ◽

The Impact

Abstract The article presents a corpus of European fictional narratives, which were continuously printed in at least six European languages from the beginning of printing until the end of the eighteenth century. It analyses the denominations of the works in European literary histories in a comparative way in order to show the impact of the different national traditions in literary history, and provides a survey of the contemporary terms for the works used in European vernaculars. In early modern Europe there was an awareness of the congruence of these narratives and a similar choice of genre attributions in different European vernaculars whereas, as a consequence of the development of nationalism and national studies, the denomination of the genre and their studies has become much more tattered. We therefore propose to use the term ‘narrative fiction’ for the genre and the term ‘fictional narrative’ for the works themselves.

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