Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-century LiteratureDavid H. Richter As millennium approaches, interpreters of eighteenth-century literature have turned to various versions of cultural poetics, which view texts through lenses of class, race, gender and sexual orientation. Meanwhile literature itself has fallen from its lofty pinnacle within the ordering of the arts, and become merely one discursive practice among many. What has been gained and what lost as literary criticism becomes a branch of cultural history? A dozen renowned scholars discuss each other's work and attempt to come to terms with the central theoretical issues about which the discipline disagrees. Focusing primarily on Henry Fielding, the essays employ and defend positions within feminism, Marxism, Bourdelian analysis, queer theory, and cultural studies, along with a more theoretically savvy version of formalist criticism. In gathering together a dozen extraordinary essays from all regions of the ideological spectrum, this collection aspires to represent for the current decade what the Laura Brown/Felicity Nussbaum anthology The New Eighteenth-Century was for the last decade: a sampler and emblem of where the intellectual currents of our time have taken our profession. |
Contents
Henry Fielding and the Valorization of Incoherence | 3 |
Novels at Work | 15 |
Ideology and Literary Form in Fieldings Tom Jones | 31 |
The Form in History | 47 |
Making Fieldings Novels Speak for Law and Order | 75 |
Closing Down the Theater and Other Critical Abuses | 89 |
Jonathan Wild and True Crime Fiction | 105 |
Arthur Young the Agricultural Tour and Ireland | 129 |
The Rules of the Game Or Why Neoclassicism Was Never an Ideology | 163 |
The Ideology of the Elegy | 185 |
An AntiIdeological Reading | 207 |
Form and the Female in the Long Eighteenth Century | 223 |
The Ends of Ideology Politics and Literary Response | 241 |
Form and Formalists Ideologies and Ideologues A Polemical Conclusion | 255 |
| 269 | |
Pope and the Ideology of the Couplet | 147 |
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action aesthetic Amelia argues artistic Austen authors autonomy Battestin Booth canon century characters classical comic complex concept couplet Crane crime crime fiction critics cultural Defoe discourse Dorriforth Eagleton eighteenth eighteenth-century elegy Elizabeth Inchbald English epic erotic essay fact female sexuality feminist feminization fiction Fielding's Fielding's novels formal gender genre Henry Fielding human ideas ideology Inchbald Ireland Irish John John Rocque Jonathan Wild Jones Joseph Andrews latitudinarian literary literature London Lucian Lycidas male means Michael Boardman misogynist misogyny Miss Milner modern moral mourning narrative nature neoclassical neoclassicism notion novelists Oxford Patricia Meyer Spacks Paul Hunter plot poem poet poetic poetry political Pope Pope's readers reading representation rhetoric Richardson Richetti Richter Rocque Sacks seems sense social Spacks specific story structure studies theory tion Tom Jones Tom's tradition trope Tyburn University Press Wild's woman women writing York Young