Cynthia Wall - Böcker

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "approach." In architecture, the term "approach" changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate "through the most interesting part of the grounds," as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the "lesser parts of speech." The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers' manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines--new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "approach." In architecture, the term "approach" changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate "through the most interesting part of the grounds," as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it. The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the "lesser parts of speech." The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers' manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines--new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.

Briefly imprisoned for preaching without a license, he is believed to have begun writing the most famous Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, while in jail. The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678 (Part I) and 1684 (Part II). Edited and annotated with the student reader in mind, this Norton Critical Edition is the indispensable guide to the language, allusions, and historical references of this challenging text. An unusually rich “Contexts” section is thematically organized in four sections: “Biographical,” “Geographical and Visual,” “Theological and Literary,” and “Abridgements and Adaptation,” and includes eleven essential visuals. “Criticism” collects twenty major essays spanning two hundred years of thinking and writing about The Pilgrim’s Progress, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Bernard Shaw, F. R. Leavis, Dorothy Van Ghent, J. Paul Hunter, Stanley Fish, Barbara A. Johnson, and Cynthia Wall, among others.

In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days. All that had been familiar, settled, known, was suddenly and entirely swept away. Londoners faced an emptiness that was not only physical but also historical, social, financial and conceptual. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London is the first study to situate the literature of Restoration and early Augustan England within the historical and cultural contexts of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Cynthia Wall relates the marked topographical specificity of plays, poems and novels to a wider cultural network of responses to changing perceptions of urban space, and she shows how the literatures of the period - along with the surveying, mapping, rebuilding and official redescribing of the city - attempt to reinvest the city with comprehensible meaning and create new spaces for new genres.

In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days. All that had been familiar, settled, known, was suddenly and entirely swept away. Londoners faced an emptiness that was not only physical but also historical, social, financial and conceptual. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London is the first study to situate the literature of Restoration and early Augustan England within the historical and cultural contexts of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Cynthia Wall relates the marked topographical specificity of plays, poems and novels to a wider cultural network of responses to changing perceptions of urban space, and she shows how the literatures of the period - along with the surveying, mapping, rebuilding and official redescribing of the city - attempt to reinvest the city with comprehensible meaning and create new spaces for new genres.

Today, when ""globalization"" is a buzzword invoked in nearly every realm, we turn back to the eighteenth century and witness the inherent globalization of its desires and, at times, its accomplishments. During the chronological eighteenth century, learning and knowledge were intimately connected across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, yet the connections themselves are largely unstudied. In The Eighteenth Centuries, twenty-two scholars across disciplines address the idea of plural Enlightenments and a global eighteenth century, transcending the demarcations that long limited our grasp of the period’s breadth and depth.Engaging concepts that span divisions of chronology and continent, these essays address topics ranging from mechanist biology, painted geographies, and revolutionary opera to Americanization, theatrical subversion of marriage, and plantation architecture. Weaving together many disparate threads of the historical tapestry we call the Enlightenment, this volume illuminates our understanding of the interconnectedness of the eighteenth centuries.

The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and cultureFrom catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity.Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between the empirical practices and technologies with which minutiae have come to be associated and the broader, more diffuse discourses—from the philosophical to the artistic—that have attended theories of smallness before and after Hooke’s Micrographia. Placing essays on Renaissance poetry, Romantic fiction, and matters of punctuation alongside essays on early modern germ theory and the optics of microscopic technology, this rigorously framed volume extends from sixteenth-century pathology to twentieth-century architectural theory, natural science to literature and art.

The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and cultureFrom catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity.Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between the empirical practices and technologies with which minutiae have come to be associated and the broader, more diffuse discourses—from the philosophical to the artistic—that have attended theories of smallness before and after Hooke’s Micrographia. Placing essays on Renaissance poetry, Romantic fiction, and matters of punctuation alongside essays on early modern germ theory and the optics of microscopic technology, this rigorously framed volume extends from sixteenth-century pathology to twentieth-century architectural theory, natural science to literature and art.

This Concise Companion presents fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literature. Contributes to current debates in the field on subjects such as the public sphere, travel and exploration, scientific rhetoric, gender and the book trade, and historical versus literary perceptions of life on London streets.Searches out connections between the remarkable number of new genres that appeared in the eighteenth century.Crosses conventional disciplinary lines.Demonstrates that philosophy, history, politics and social theory both influence and are influenced by literature.