Glasgow as a Centre for the Arts, Science and Medicine

This chapter showcases Glasgow as a truly important, often central, hub of the Scottish Enlightenment. Beginning with Francis Hutcheson’s revolutionary ideas and teaching style, the chapter traces the activities of the Foulis brothers, William Cullen, William Hunter, Tobias Smollett, and James Watt.

Civil Rage

This essay approaches the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 as constituting, by most Enlightenment and modern definitions, a civil war, and considers the implications for poems written during or soon after the rising by William Collins, Hester Mulso (later Chapone), Tobias Smollett, and others. Classical tropes of civil war are among the literary features structuring these poems, which often take the form, more specifically, of odes, exploiting the formal capacity of the ode to dramatize internal division. Roman concepts of bellum civile and “Intestine Wars” (Pope’s Pharsalian expression from Windsor-Forest) are obviously to the fore. So, more interestingly, are the Athenian syntagmata recently emphasized by Nicole Loraux and, following her, Giorgio Agamben: stasis emphylos, an internecine conflict particular to the phylon, to lineage or blood kinship; haima homaimon, the murder of a blood relation, literally blood of the same blood; oikeios polemos, war within the household or among kinsmen. The common thread is the notion of murderous familial breach as a way of catching the paradox and horror of civil conflict while also indicating possible grounds of future reconciliation.

A representação da Inglaterra e da Escócia em The expedition of Humphry Clinker

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar a representação da Inglaterra e da Escócia no romance The expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), do escritor escocês Tobias Smollett. Escrito em forma epistolar, o romance narra as impressões de uma família galesa acerca das cidades que visita durante uma viagem pela Grã-Bretanha. Assim, as cartas do romance permitem conhecer a Inglaterra e a Escócia do século XVIII sob uma variedade de perspectivas. Apesar da união dos parlamentos da Escócia e da Inglaterra em 1707, a ideia de “britânico” no período em que o romance foi produzido estava muito atrelada à cultura e à língua inglesas, de modo que os escoceses eram vistos como inferiores aos ingleses. Sendo assim, cabe observar como, ao contrastar cidades da Inglaterra e da Escócia, Smollett pretende subverter os preconceitos e falsas concepções direcionados aos escoceses, tão comuns nos romances produzidos na Inglaterra, unificando a ideia de escocês àquela de britânico.

Tobias Smollett and the Ramble Novel

This chapter explores the current image of mid-eighteenth-century fiction, considering the work of Tobias Smollett. No author sits less comfortably with, especially the emphasis on the politeness and sensibility of mid-century British culture, and no author is less amenable to feminist perspectives, than Smollett. Closer attention to this most unlikable author provides a better understanding of some of the most confounding incidents in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and early sentimental fiction. The chapter then examines Smollett's major novel, Peregrine Pickle (1751), a text that moves almost systematically through the everyday comic situations of its age. Every season throughout the 1750s and 1760s brought ten or twelve new ‘lives’ and ‘histories’, each of them using a skeletal plot and a rudimentary central character to unify a string of broad comic incidents. These texts were often called ramble novels, after the names of so many central characters and their careless progress through the world.

Miguel de Cervantes en The Monthly Review y The Critical Review: la prosa (1749-1800)

Cervantes goza de un enorme protagonismo en la literatura británica del siglo XVIII. Su influencia se pone de manifiesto en Joseph Andrews, que Henry Fielding subtituló “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”, y en producciones de autores como Tobias Smollett o Charlotte Lennox. La visión de la crítica cobra un valor significativo a mediados de siglo, con el nacimiento de The Monthly Review y The Critical Review que proporcionaban exámenes de novedades bibliográficas. En este trabajo se plantea el estudio de la huella cervantina en la novela británica a partir de las valoraciones críticas producidas por ambas publicaciones periódicas desde sus inicios hasta finales de siglo.

Travellers, Connoisseurs, and Britons: Art Commentaries and National Discourse in the Travel Writings of Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett

This article seeks to explore the interrelationship of two facets characterising eighteenth-century travel writing – art commentaries and national discourse. It is demonstrated that one of the reasons behind the travellers’ repetitious attempts to fashion themselves as connoisseurs was a need to re-affirm their national identity. To this end it offers an analysis of two travel texts coming from two different political moments – Daniel Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1726), constituting an attempt to read the British as a “great” and prosperous nation after the union of 1707, and Tobias Smollett’s idiosyncratic Travels through France and Italy (1766), shedding light on the British attitude towards the South in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and at the outset of the cult of feeling in Britain. It will also be argued that the numerous art commentaries throughout the narratives had a political agenda and supported the national discourse underpinning the texts.