Print in transition: studies in media and book history

Book synopsis: This book examines the outbreak of print in late Victorian Britain. It joins categories that are normally separated: literature/popular culture, books/magazines, publishers/newsagents, and media studies/media history. The approach is through material culture, archival material that is theorised and gendered. Chapters focus on authorship, production, and gender in relation to Dickens, Pater, Ruskin, Eliot, Symons, and James, and serials such as Master Humphrey's Clock, the Westminster Review, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, Publishers' Circular, Yellow Book and Savoy

The periodical essayists of the eighteenth century

The present work is an endeavour to give an approximately complete and detailed survey of the Periodical Essay of the Eighteenth Century and its writers. In the preparation of the work, the author has seen and examined over one hundred and fifty periodicals . Many of these are now exceedingly rare, an full use has been made of the valuable collections in the great libraries: - The -British Museum Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Advocate's, the Signet's, and the University Libraries, Edinburgh. In addition the author has been privileged to see a number of periodicals in private collection.The question of arrangement presented difficulties. The simplest solution was to adopt as far as possible a chronological plan. The advantages of this scheme outweighed the dis- :advantage of a certain 'catalogue -y' effect which was almost inevitable when so many periodicals were being passed under review. A number of illustrative extracts support the critical statements made.Up to the present time no work has appeared devoted exclusively to this subject and limited to this period. Accordingly this endeavour to deal with the whole field of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century, (with the Martial exception of the work of Nathan Drake of over a century ago) is pioneer work, and an original contribution to the subject based on wholly personal investigation.An index of periodicals alphabetically and chronologically arranged concludes the work

The Cowl - v.33 - n.11 - Nov 20, 1980

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 33 - No. 11 - November 20, 1980. 16 pages

Paley, William: science and rhetoric in his natural theology

William Paley's Natural Theology is probably the nineteenth century's most well- known design argument. As such an influential book, it is almost expected that twentieth century intellectual historians should at least pay a footnote to it. In midst of all these studies about the impact of Natural Theology upon the nineteenth century, one key fact is forgotten: Natural Theology and its sources were written in the eighteenth century. It is the goal of this thesis to demonstrate that Paley's design argument must be compared to the intellectual climate of that time period. Chapters 1 and 2 outline the rhetorical argument and the tools that Paley used to persuade his polite eighteenth century audience. The majority of scientific sources and examples he used were well-known names and therefore implicitly contributed to the believability of his argument. Accordingly, chapters 3 and 4 investigate why Paley's scientific sources added credibility to Natural Theology. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the actual scientific data that Paley turned into examples for his design argument. Setting the rhetoric aside, what was the actual scientific picture communicated by his examples? In these chapters, we find that even though Paley argues against random change, he does support a morphological telic change—the development of a supplemental part based on a pre-existing, fixed body part. As every chapter of this thesis unfolds, it will become more apparent that Paley was an intellectual heir to the eighteenth century. He wrote in a polite manner and employed a body of standard eighteenth century natural philosophical knowledge. It is this context that must be addressed and seriously considered when studying the nineteenth century intellectual legacy of Natural Theology

Decorum and the rural poor in English and Scots poetry, 1770-1812

This study depends on the premise that rural poetry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides more reliable evidence of contemporary assumptions about poetry than of contemporary knowledge of the rural poor. According to the concept of neoclassical decorum, poetry was expected to achieve a balance between the probable and the morally admirable. As the ideals of poetry's major audience became more urban and middle-class (if the reviewers may be taken as representative), what was regarded as probable by the poet and recognized as admirable by the reader began to diverge. Consequently the poet's role, as dramatized in his poetry by his persona, began to change, from commentator to mediator to seeker after uncertain values. Early nineteenth-century reviewers tended to interpret poetry in such a way as to confirm their sense of the centrality of the urban middle classes. They would approve poetry which presented their milieu as the repository of values, the pivot of consensus, and were less responsive to poetry which defined their interests as peripheral, requiring mediation with other sets of values. Decorum began to be interpreted as a harmony not of social relations but of more private and less holistic moral values. Correspondingly it became less common for poetry to refer, by means of abstractions (the 'poetic diction' rejected by Wordsworth), to the implicit context of consensual beliefs provided by decorum. The increasing emphasis on sentiment and particularity of description in poetry suggests a weakening of decorum. It indicates a growing effort to determine the response of the reader by means of a context created by the individual poem alone. Moreover, the experimental techniques of the major poets discussed in this study point to a dissatisfaction with conventional notions of decorum. Their experiments stemmed, in part, from their concern with the rural poor and their consequent detachment from the increasingly assertive urban literary milieu. Goldsmith, for instance, attempted to amalgamate the older kind of poetry of social relations with the newer kind of poetry of individual sensibility in order to advocate a social order based on values which were less mercantile and more familial. Crabbe emphasized the irregularity and discord of contemporary society in order to expose the unreality of the ideals of harmony and uniformity basic to decorum. Similarly Cowper concentrated on apparently insignificant details in order to challenge accepted proprieties. Burns made use of the ironic and dramatic qualities of the Scots vernacular tradition to present a moral and social relativity which threatened the hierarchical assumptions of his readers. Wordsworth's poetry embodies the most thoroughgoing rejection of the implicit contract of decorum connecting the proprieties of the poem with social proprieties -r he attempted to recreate a consensus on the basis of unmediated individual experience. Although the risk of isolating idiosyncrasies led to compromises in the work of all of these poets, it was their common effort to forge a new consensus between poet and reader (rather than the celebration of the individual sensibility more commonly associated with Romanticism) which enabled them to escape the divisions which rend the poetry of Clare