Clemson University Press: Eighteenth-Century Moments – serie

This project overall attempts to recast Appalachian literature in terms of a ‘lost tradition’ of texts that are generally out-of-print though of central importance to understanding the history of the region and its current environmental and cultural challenges. The epilogue will also consider the way that ecological-based literary criticism offers a vital language for how antebellum travel writers sought to frame the region from a 19th-century environmental point of view.The book aims to resituate the field of Appalachian Studies to an earlier historic genesis in the 19th-century and bring to light several books which have received scant scholarly attention in the canon of Appalachian and American literature, respectively. The book centers on the argument that mid-19th-century travel writers going through or from the Appalachian region drew on familiar versions of 18th-century European, mainly British, landscape aesthetics that would help make the readerly experience less alien to their erudite regional and Northern audiences. These travel writers, such as Philip Pendleton Kennedy and David Hunter Strother, consciously appropriated such aesthetic tropes as the pastoral as a way to further dramatic the effect in their nonfiction accounts of Appalachia, while the reader could find such references comforting as they considered whether to domesticate or tour the Appalachian region.

Genial Perception offers a critical examination of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s naturalist construction of creative and critical perception, and a historical study of the perceptual dimension of poetic taste. “Genial” is the adjectival form of “genius,” and eighteenth-century critical naturalism understands “genial” perception as a gift of nature, as an inborn power operating autonomously through the senses and imagination and thus independently of cultural influence. By exploring the philology of keywords and binaries inherited by the two poet-critics and used to describe and interpret their perceptual experience, both creative (imaginative) and critical, Genial Perception traces how that experience reveals an unacknowledged indebtedness to discourse and language, having been silently and perhaps unconsciously shaped by patterns and trends in the literary culture in which Wordsworth and Coleridge came of age. This study shows that critical perception, often thought to be too elusive and subjective to make a proper subject for historical investigation, can be approached through study of the terms—the language—of the practical criticism that attempts to communicate it; that both critical and creative perception are far more dependent on language than is commonly recognized; and that philology, by recovering the original usage, functions, and contexts of critical keywords, provides for an accurate historical understanding of the claims made by critics in the long eighteenth century for “genial” perception, and can illuminate the dynamics of “genial” perception itself.

Featuring nine chapters by a group of internationally renowned scholars, this book recovers Cowley’s unique achievement as a poet working across and between the genres and disciplines of his time and of our own. When Cowley died, he was the most famous poet in England, and his popularity continued throughout the eighteenth century; for instance, he was much more widely published than Donne, Herbert, Marvell, or Crashaw. Yet Cowley has virtually disappeared from the canon today, even from collections of metaphysical poetry, although it was Cowley who occasioned Samuel Johnson’s famous definition of metaphysical poetry in the first place. What circumstances led to Cowley’s sudden, precipitous fall? This book argues that Cowley’s initial popularity and later fall in reputation have a similar origin: the experimental qualities, and the range, of his poetry. Cowley’s works bridge disciplines (science, poetry), modes (prose, verse), and genres (lyric, ode, epic) in unexpected ways. The same mixed, eccentric, digressive, and unfinished qualities that endeared Cowley’s poetry to his contemporaries doomed his reputation for later readers unable to deal with his idiosyncratic style and defiance of recognized categories. Arguing that he mixed neoclassical and baroque, metaphysical and baroque, cavalier and metaphysical, poetry and prose, epic and history, science and verse, the contributors to this book reveal Cowley as a kaleidoscopic mind whose challenging writings fell between established categories and therefore fell through the cracks of literary history.

Reading Samuel Johnson examines how the eighteenth-century author, lexicographer, and wit, Samuel Johnson was later read and represented by writers between 1750 to 1970. The writers range from James Boswell and Jane Austen to Lord Byron and Samuel Beckett. The book focuses as much on these later writers as on Johnson himself. It also examines how Johnson sought to understand himself, and how later writers responded to or ignored Johnson’s own self-understanding. This is the first detailed historical analysis of the way that later writers engaged with Samuel Johnson over an extended timeframe (of over 200 years).The book sheds light on how writers bring their own unique creative energies, preoccupations and cultural affiliations to the reading experience. Writers find their own space, I argue, in part, through their responses to other authors. Reading Johnson has prompted writers, in turn, to write about him. Translating Johnson for contemporary audiences, authors have used very different means, including the writing of letters, essays, biographical representations, poetry, fiction and editorial practice. This has proved a dynamic process, both shedding new light on Johnson but also impacting writer’s own imaginative practice. ‘Reading Dr Johnson’ has, therefore, always been a pre-eminently creative process.

Tobias Smollett After 300 Years offers a collection of essays on one of the great literary figures of the eighteenth century: the Scottish writer, Tobias Smollett (1721–1771). Drawing together the work of an international group of scholars, with a variety of critical approaches, the book examines aspects of Smollett’s life, writing and reputation on the occasion of the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Smollett is perhaps best known today as a novelist. However, he also worked tirelessly as a translator, historian, critic and editor. Whilst this book gives space to Smollett’s innovations in writing fiction (described, variously, as malapropic, metaleptic, avuncular and periodical), it also draws on his wider work, situating it in the intellectual and visual culture of the book trade, traditions of domestic and humoral medicine, the politics of the Anglo-Scottish Union and projects to write a national history. Moments of Smollett’s biography are revisited through newly-published correspondence, including accounts of his relationship to the sale of enslaved people. A new area for Smollett studies – his reception in Russia – suggests the reach of his work. The book concludes with some reflections on the state of Smollett studies today and the urgent message this eighteenth-century writer might bring to twenty-first century classrooms.

This critical biography is a posthumous publication by a Pope scholar of international reputation. It gathers the scholarship and insights of the author’s earlier books and essays on Pope into a final work of new research and a lifetime’s reflection on its subject, aimed at the informed general reader as well as students and professional scholars.The book places Pope’s life, friendships, and poetry in the context of the political state of Britain following the Revolution of 1688, the year of the poet’s birth. It is sympathetic to the revisionist history which argues that Jacobitism was a serious and persistent phenomenon, and brings out more fully than previously the extent of Pope’s contact with Catholic and Jacobite circles in England and abroad, giving this biography a distinctive approach and emphasis. Pope’s friendships, with both Whigs and Tories, with men and women, are brought into relation to the poetry.Professor Erskine-Hill gives sensitive close readings of all Pope’s major poems, but also of the less commonly explored, notably the translations of Homer and especially of the Iliad. Frequent resort is made to Pope’s letters, among the finest of the age, including new items. A final chapter discusses Pope’s literary reputation in the later eighteenth-century subsequent to his death.