Gleaning Modernity
Earlier Eighteenth-Century Literature and the Modernizing Process
Eric Rothstein(Author)
University of Delaware Press
Will be published approx. on 1. November 2007
Book
Hardback
269 pages
978-1-61149-321-4 (ISBN)
Description
Gleaning Modernity shows how earlier eighteenth-century literary texts might have eased the way for Britain's increasing modernity. They allowed Modern scenarios to be played out imaginatively, as simulations for experimental, predictive ends. The process spoke to the needs and desires of readers in a world of rapid, managed change. It worked unobtrusively first because of the practice of recycling old forms, as Pope and Richardson did, for example, with Horatian and tragic models, respectively; and second because given texts offered different readers a range of interpretative options. Along with providing original readings of such major texts as Gulliver's Travels and Clarissa, this study enlarges our sense of the Modernizing process. It also shows how a consumer-driven Darwinian model of adaptive change, affecting literature and its readership, can help us understand the ways in which literature can have social efficacy.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 243 mm
Width: 169 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
585 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61149-321-4 (9781611493214)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Eric Rothstein is Edgar W. Lacy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin.