scholarly journals Steele and Addison: the periodical essay and the rise of the domestic novel

Creativity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 3
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Periodical Essay

Harriet Martineau’s Epistemology of Gossip

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-207
Author(s):  
Kristen A. Pond
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Main Function ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Novel ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge ◽  
The Way

Kristen A. Pond, “Harriet Martineau’s Epistemology of Gossip” (pp. 175–207) This essay is a fresh examination of Harriet Martineau’s only domestic novel, Deerbrook (1838). Though the novel seems like an interruption to those writings considered more typical of the author, and more successful, this essay traces the way in which Deerbrook’s preoccupation with epistemology connects it in important ways to the rest of Martineau’s oeuvre. While in most of her writing Martineau gives preference to what the Victorians considered to be empirical and rational ways of knowing, in Deerbrook she focuses on more typically feminized knowledge forms that rely on speculation and intuition, in particular the discourse of gossip. This essay argues that gossip’s main function in Deerbrook is not as plot device or didactic warning; rather, it functions as an epistemological category that challenges Enlightenment presumptions to certain knowledge. Read as a source of knowledge rather than a female vice, gossip becomes the tool through which Martineau raises the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge that might counter, or at least complicate, assumptions about what constitutes certain truth and right knowledge.

Lounging on the Sofa with Leigh Hunt: A New Source for the Notes in Melville's Shakespeare Volume

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sanborn
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Implied Reader ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Periodical Essay

Abstract The argument of this essay is that several of the notes that Herman Melville wrote in the back leaves of one of his Shakespeare volumes——notes that have been an object of interest and speculation ever since their discovery in the 1930s——were responses to essays written by Leigh Hunt and collected in a volume called The Indicator. In all likelihood, Melville read these essays——along with a Quarterly Review essay by Francis Palgrave, which has previously been shown to be the source of other notes in the back of the Shakespeare volume——on the sofa of his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, shortly before or after the birth of his son Malcolm in February 1849. The discovery of the new source is important both as an aid in identifying when and where Melville took all of these notes and as an indication of how carefully Melville studied the British periodical essay before beginning Moby-Dick (1851). In the essays of writers like Hunt, he encountered a form that seemed as though it could stretch to accommodate his literary and philosophical ambitions without sacrificing the companionship of the implied reader. For at least two years, Melville would believe enough in the possibilities of that form to compose his miraculously sociable expressions of unresolvable hope and rage, to give voice to the seemingly ““wicked,”” and yet to feel, as he told Nathaniel Hawthorne, ““spotless as the lamb.””

The Daughter's Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 110
Author(s):  
Rachel M. Brownstein ◽  
Paula Marantz Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Process ◽  
Domestic Novel

On Coffee-Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 150-166
Author(s):  
Denise Gigante
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Dreams And Visions ◽  
Periodical Essay ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Cigar Smoking

The Romantic essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt, in two essays saturated with nostalgia for a lost world of Enlightenment coffee-house sociability, registers a shift in the cultural place of the literary essay in the 1820s—the era of the cigar-smoking George IV—from an urban public sphere dominated by Mr Spectator and his pipe, to more suburban cubicles of domestic privacy. Through the medium of Hunt’s self-reflective essays on the English periodical essay tradition, this chapter reveals the fate of the literary periodical essay to be linked to a fading amateur culture of belles-lettres and ornamental arts. Hunt blames the early essayists for the result of the civilizing process: the cultivation of a taste for polite literature that has isolated readers and emptied Covent Garden of its intellectual life. The reveries, dreams, and visions of the literary essay made possible by the Orientalized cigar divan (Romantic successor to the coffee-house) reflect the complicated reality of London in an age of global imperialism.

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