The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth CenturyVirginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object—a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty, unvisualized spaces of such writings were transformed into the elaborate landscapes and richly upholstered interiors of the Victorian novel, Cynthia Sundberg Wall argues that the shift involved not just literary representation but an evolution in cultural perception. In The Prose of Things, Wall analyzes literary works in the contexts of natural science, consumer culture, and philosophical change to show how and why the perception and representation of space in the eighteenth-century novel and other prose narratives became so textually visible. Wall examines maps, scientific publications, country house guides, and auction catalogs to highlight the thickening descriptions of domestic interiors. Considering the prose works of John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, David Hume, Ann Radcliffe, and Sir Walter Scott, The Prose of Things is the first full account of the historic shift in the art of describing. |
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The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century Cynthia Sundberg Wall No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
Architecture argues beautiful Behn Cambridge University Press Castle of Otranto chairs chapter characters Chicago Clarendon Clarissa classical Critical Crusoe cultural Daniel Defoe Defoe described detail Diary domestic Door early eighteenth-century Early Modern Edited eighteenth England English Essays example Fiction furniture Garden genre Gothic Haywood History Horace Walpole Hume Humphry Repton interior introduction Ivanhoe James John Bunyan John Byng John Evelyn John Stow Lady landscape literary London Macaulay maps metaphor Micrographia Moll Moll Flanders Mysteries of Udolpho narration narrative novel novelists objects Ogilby Old English Baron ornament Oxford University Press Painting Pamela particular Paul Hunter Penguin Pepys Pilgrim's Progress Poetics Poetry Poets Radcliffe reader Reprint Repton rhetoric Richardson Robert Samuel scene sense seventeenth century Sharrock social sort space spatial Stow Stow's textual praxes things Thomas tion Translated Udolpho visual vols William writing Yale University Press York
References to this book
The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies Andrea A. Lunsford,Kirt H. Wilson,Rosa A. Eberly No preview available - 2009 |