Introducing Life to “the Young, the Ignorant, and the Idle”: Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe as Popular Novelists

The remarkable commercial success of the novels of Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood in the first few decades of the eighteenth century testifies to a series of cultural phenomena that merit close critical attention. For instance, setting the overwhelming popularity of both writers during their lifetimes in contrast with the scant—though steadily growing—critical recognition accorded to Haywood in our time provides a succinct and vivid illustration of the vagaries of the literary canon. As can be guessed, the snakes and ladders in Defoe and Haywood’s game of fame had mostly to do with their gender, as well as with the genre of their most celebrated productions. Ironically, however, for good or evil, their contemporaries tended to put both writers together in the same basket. While professional critics belittled their talents in public—and perhaps envied them in private—the reading public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for their fictions. In short, Haywood and Defoe were fully-fledged popular novelists, with all the positive and negative connotations attached to this label. A key to gauging their place in the history of the novel lies, then, in the type of readers for whom they vied. This article reviews some of the correspondences between Haywood and Defoe—emphasizing their equality in terms of cultural relevance in their own time—with a view to complicate conventional assessments of Defoe as a star novelist and Haywood as a minor writer of amatory fiction, and to encourage reflection about literary practices then and now

Medicina, filosofía y literatura: senderos que se (re)encuentran

RESEÑ

Errors and Reconciliations: Marriage in the Plays and Early Novels of Henry Fielding

This thesis explores Henry Fielding’s fascination with marriage, and the importance of the marriage plot in his plays and early novels. Its main argument is twofold: it contends that Fielding presents marriage as symptomatic of moral and social evils on the one hand, and as a powerful source of moral improvement on the other. It also argues that the author imported and adapted the theatrical marriage plot—a key diegetic structure of stage comedies of the early eighteenth century—into his prose fictions. Following the hypothesis that this was his favourite narrative vehicle, as it proffered harmony between form and content, the thesis illustrates the ways in which Fielding transposed some of the well-established dramatic conventions of the marriage plot into the novel, a genre that was gaining in cultural status at the time. The Introduction provides background information for the study of marriage in Fielding’s work, offering a brief historical contextualization of marital laws and practices before the Marriage Act of 1753. Section One presents close readings of ten representative plays, investigating the writer’s first discovery of the theatrical marriage plot, and the ways in which he appropriated and experimented with it. The four chapters that compose the second part of the thesis trace the interrelated development of the marriage plot and theatrical motifs in Fielding’s early novels, namely Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), Jonathan Wild (1743), and The Female Husband (1746). By drawing attention to the continuities between Fielding’s plays and novels, my research challenges the conventional Richardson-Fielding dichotomy, proposing alternative readings that demonstrate that Fielding’s novels are more indebted to their author’s theatrical past than to the factual, but frequently overstated, rivalry with Samuel Richardson. A key argument, which this thesis offers as an innovative contribution, is that the novel form as moulded by Fielding at mid-century has an explicitly theatrical bearing, which has hitherto not been studied

Exóticos, ilustrados y polémicos placeres del Imperio: el chocolate, el té y el café en la literatura inglesa (1650-1834)

En 1650 el primer café de Inglaterra abrió sus puertas al público. Este evento inauguró la expansión acelerada de un modelo de negocio que al cabo de unas décadas se convertiría en el sitio emblemático de la sociabilidad con aspiraciones intelectuales. Las chocolaterías no se hicieron esperar, con la primera de que se tiene noticia en colmar las tazas de sus comensales en 1657. A estos dos elíxires novedosos pronto se les sumó el té como bebida esencial de consumo social. Desde el principio, las tres sustancias fueron blanco de acaloradas polémicas. En este ensayo se abordan representaciones literarias del té, el café y el chocolate que dan cuenta de las contribuciones estéticas e ideológicas del mundo de las letras a este intrigante fenómeno cultural

Respect.

<p>The keywords were identified using the Atlas.ti 6.0 software. The words were sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the interviews. The cut-off point, which divides the set of words into high-frequency and low-frequency groups, was identified. The graphs explaining the frequency of appearance were created with MS Excel 2007.</p

Today´s medical self and the other: Challenges and evolving solutions for enhanced humanization and quality of care

<div><p>Background</p><p>Recent scientific developments, along with growing awareness of cultural and social diversity, have led to a continuously growing range of available treatment options; however, such developments occasionally lead to an undesirable imbalance between science, technology and humanism in clinical practice. This study explores the understanding and practice of values and value clusters in real-life clinical settings, as well as their role in the humanization of medicine and its institutions. The research focuses on the values of clinical practice as a means of finding ways to enhance the pairing of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) with Values-based Medicine (VBM) in daily practice.</p><p>Methods and findings</p><p>The views and representations of clinical practice in 15 pre-CME and 15 post-CME interviews were obtained from a random sampling of active healthcare professionals. These views were then identified and qualitatively analyzed using a three-step hermeneutical approach.</p><p>A <i>clinical values space</i> was identified in which ethical and epistemic values emerge, grow and develop within the biomedical, ethical, and socio-economic dimensions of everyday health care. Three main values—as well as the dynamic clusters and networks that they tend to form—were recognized: healthcare personnel-patient relationships, empathy, and respect. An examination of the interviews suggested that an adequate conceptualization of values leads to the formation of a wider axiological system. The role of <i>clinician-as-consociate</i> emerged as an ideal for achieving medical excellence.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>By showing the intricate clusters and networks into which values are interwoven, our analysis suggests methods for fine-tuning educational interventions so they can lead to demonstrable changes in attitudes and practices.</p></div

Empathy value networks before CME training.

<p><b>A.</b> The keywords were identified using the Atlas.ti 6.0 software. The words were sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the interviews. <b>B. Empathy value networks after CME training.</b> The keywords were identified using the Atlas.ti 6.0 software. The words were sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the interviews</p

Healthcare personnel-patient relationship value networks before CME training.

<p><b>A.</b> Keywords were identified using the Atlas.ti 6.0 software. The words were sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the interviews. <b>B. Healthcare personnel-patient relationship value networks after CME training</b>. Keywords were identified using the Atlas.ti 6.0 software. The words were sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the interviews.</p

Consociate clinician-patient relationship as cement for the EBM and VBM binomial.

<p>Quotations from interviews illustrating its key aspects.</p

Value semantic networks.

<p>Keywords were identified using the Atlas.ti 6.0 software. The words were sorted according to the frequency of their appearance in the interviews. The cut-off point, which divides the set of words into high-frequency and low-frequency groups, was identified. Radial graphs explaining the frequency of appearance were created with MS Excel 2007. The upper left-hand side (I) shows the most relevant values that are consistently mentioned and discussed by the participants prior to the CME intervention on clinical ethics. The lower right-hand side (II) shows the most relevant values that are consistently mentioned and discussed by the participants following the CME intervention on clinical ethics.</p