Barbauld's Richardson and the canonisation of personal character

In The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804), Anna Letitia Barbauld set out to assure readers that the novelist’s personal character (as displayed in his letters) corresponded to his authorial moral character (as inferred through his novels) in order to present him as an appropriate father of the modern British novel – a process I call the “canonisation of private character.” To that end, Barbauld’s editorial work presented Richardson as a benevolent patriarchal figure whose moral authority over the domestic life of his extended family guaranteed the morality of his novels and of his personal character. As my case study of Richardson’s correspondence with Sarah Wescomb shows, Barbauld’s interventions accordingly muted challenges to Richardson’s authority on questions of paternal control or filial obedience. Life writing, textual criticism, and literary history were therefore so intimately intertwined in Barbauld’s treatment of Richardson and his writings that they mutually constituted and sustained each other. Her contributions to the elevation and institution of novels as a national literary genre – in the Correspondence as well as in her later prefaces to The British Novelists (1810) – accordingly should be read in conjunction with her biographical elevation and canonisation of Richardson as the first properly moral, modern novelist

F. Scott Fitzgerald : his materials and his methods

From the time I was first introduced to Fitzgerald\u27s writing through a reading of This Side of Paradise, when I was a freshman in college, his subject matter and technique as a novelist have interested me intensely. After reading the first novel, I was not satisfied until I had voraciously read his other novels. With each reading of another of his books, my interest increased. Later, when Mizener\u27s valuable biography appeared, I was introduced to Fitzgerald the man and have found his life as fascinating as his writings. However I felt that none of the books about Fitzgerald completely presented the carry-over of living material from his own experiences to his novels; nor were his techniques employed in novel writing fully examined

Theatre of the Mind: Hardy the Dynasts and the Question of Form

This essay analyzes Hardy’s rarely discussed epic-drama, The Dynasts, especially in relation to trends in the early twentieth-century drama. Hardy’s work is a hybrid of epic, drama, and lyric and was, at the time, thought to be unstageable

Between Two Literary Traditions - The Writings of Flann O’Brien

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

The development of the French novel from Madame de la Fayette to Pierre Loti.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

America Abandoned: German-Jewish Visions of American Poverty in Serialized Novels by Joseph Roth, Sholem Asch, and Michael Gold

In 1930, Hungarian- born Jewish author Arthur Holitscher’s book Wiedersehn mit Amerika: Die Verwandlung der U.S.A. (Reunion with America: The Trans-formation of the U.S.A.) was reviewed by one J. Raphael in the German- Jewish Orthodox weekly newspaper, Der Israelit. This reviewer concluded: “Despite its good reputation, America is a strange country. And Holitscher, whose relationship to Judaism is not explicit, but direct, has determined that to be the case for American Jews as well.” The reviewer’s use of the word “strange” (komisch) offers powerful insight into the complex perceptions of America held by many German- speaking Jews, which in 1930 were at best mixed and ambivalent. An earlier travel book by Arthur Holitscher (1869– 1941) from 1912 depicts America more favorably, though it is widely believed to have provided inspiration for Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika: Der Verschollene (Amerika or The Man who Disappeared, published posthumously in 1927), which famously opens with a description of the Statue of Liberty holding aloft a sword rather than a torch. [excerpt

Muriel Spark and Africa

Muriel Spark’s centenary year has offered opportunities to explore elements of her writing that deserve wider attention. Her time in Africa is vital in this respect. An exhibition at the National Library of Scotland reveals aspects of Spark’s sojourn in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa (https://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/muriel-spark/Africa); critic Eleanor Byrne has begun to map out the impact of time there on her work (https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2017/11/go-away-bird-muriel-spark-southern-rhodesia/?print=print); and one of the fruits of the Muriel Spark 100 celebrations is a new book by writer Shane Strachan linking Spark’s African experiences with Scotland (http://www.shanestrachan.com/blog/2018/10/20/nevertheless-muriel-spark-in-bulawayo-murielspark100). Here, with a view to contributing to the discussion around Scotland’s colonial past, I want to look at the afterlife of Africa in Spark’s writings beyond the poems and stories that expressly draw on her experience of that continent

Xavier Herbert: Forgotten or Repressed?

Xavier Herbert is one of Australia’s outstanding novelists and one of the more controversial. In his time, he was also an outspoken public figure. Yet many young Australians today have not heard of the man or his novels. His key works Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) won major awards and were judged as highly significant on publication, yet there has been relatively little analysis of their impact. Although providing much material for Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster film Australia (2008), his works are rarely recommended as texts in school curricula or in universities. Gough Whitlam took a particular interest in the final draft of Poor Fellow My Country, describing it as a work of ‘national significance’ and ensuring the manuscript was sponsored to final publication. In 1976 Randolph Stow described it as ‘THE Australian classic’. Yet, a search of the Australian Literature database will show that it is one of the most under-read and least taught works in the Australian literary canon. In our view, an examination of his legacy is long overdue. This collection brings together new scholarship that explores the possible reasons for Herbert’s eclipse within public recognition, from his exposure of unpalatable truths such as interracial intimacy, to his relationship with fame. This reevaluation gives new readings of the works of this important if not troublesome public intellectual and author