Reading 1759

Reviews / Votes

This volume offers fine essays devoted to the pivotal year 1759, a time when Britain emerged as a world power to be reckoned with and when the British literary scene exploded with a collateral force. Regan (Queen's Univ., Belfast) divides the collection into six sections, treating the literature of empire and war, sentimentality, authorship, the Enlightenment, the notion of authorial originality, and the "culture of reading." The volume treats major writers, including Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Oliver Goldsmith, Christopher Smart, David Hume, Laurence Sterne, and Sarah Fielding. Reading 1759 offers a superb, cogent introduction to mid-18th-century literary culture, covering much important ground and opening up new prospects for future investigation. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice Reviews * Reading 1759 nevertheless provides interesting insights into a number of notable works and authors and makes a useful contribution to Bucknell University Press's Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850 transnational eighteenth-century studies series. . . .[S]cholars will find new perspectives on the texts and authors that distinguished 1759's contributions to literary history. * The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer * Reading 1759 calls attention to an interesting and pivotal moment in British and French history and reading culture by bringing together eleven essays on different aspects of the literature of that year. As Shaun Regan explains in his introduction to the volume, the year 1759 is particularly suited for this kind of cross-disciplinary study because it was the midpoint of the Seven Years' War and was marked by cultural events such as the public opening of the British Museum, as well as the publication of major literary works by Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke (1-2). By encompassing the literature of both Britain and France, Reading 1759 invites a more transnational approach to literature that better approximates what readers at the time could have experienced. Regan explains that 'the purpose of the new essays collected together in Reading 1759 is to investigate the literary culture of Britain and France during this remarkable year' (2). Taken as a whole, the volume does this quite well. . . .Reading 1759 offers an overview of major authors and works from this year of literary, historical, and cultural change. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *