Mentoring in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (review)

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-79
Author(s):  
Martha J. Koehler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Literature

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Literature ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Early American ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. It makes these claims on the basis of recent scholarship on how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, and evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford importing British cultural products. In doing so, this work merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. This book, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, this book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

Shaping the Verisimilitude: Moral Didacticism and Neoclassical Principles Responsible for the Rise of the English Novel?

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218
Author(s):  
Petru Golban
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Major Aspect ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Literary System

The rise of the novel is a major aspect of the eighteenth century British literature having a remarkable typology: picaresque, adventure, epistolary, sentimental, of manners, moral, comic, anti-novel. The comic (including satirical) attitude, social concern, moral didacticism, and other thematically textualized aspects – emerging from both picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – and together with picaresque tradition and neoclassical principles – are responsible for the emergence of verisimilitude as the forming element responsible in turn for the rise of the literary system of the novel.

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