This book is an annotated edition of The Correspondents: An Original Novel (1775), a work, as the introduction argues, derived from A Sentimental Journey, and one of the best of the many later efforts to capture Sterne’s unique blend of sensibility and sensuality. The introduction will make the case for its authorship being an actual exchange of love letters between George Lord Lyttelton (1709–1773) and Apphia Peach Lyttelton (1743–1840), his daughter-in-law, 30 years you...

Given the progress made in recent years in recovering the writings of early modern women, one might expect that a complete set of the important works of Mary Astell (1666-1731) would have been reissued long before now. Instead, only portions of the thought of the 'First English Feminist' have reached a wide academic audience. This volume presents a critical and annotated edition of the correspondence between Astell and John Norris of Bemerton (1657-1711), Letters Concerning the Love of God...

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age “resisted secularism” is by no means to argue that resi...

'L-d! said my mother, what is all this story about? - A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick - And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard'Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, ...

For more than twenty years, The Age of Johnson has aspired to present to a wide readership a body of influential Johnsonian scholarship “in the broadest sense,” as founder Paul J. Korshin put it. In keeping with this sentiment, volume 25 contains cant-free scholarly articles and essays written by both leaders in the field and emerging scholars, among them a London barrister and a medical school professor. Featuring lively and penetrating work on Johnson’s medical conditions, his e...

This collection presents fourteen essays on annotating eighteenth-century literature. Authored by editors and annotators of current standard editions—such as California’s Works of John Dryden, the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, and the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson—this book explores theoretical perspectives on critical editing and the practical work of annotation. Through examples from their own editorial work, the contributors illuminate the personal dilem...

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. Deemed more accessible than Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and often assigned as a college text, A Sentimental Journey has received its share of critical attention, but—unlike *Tristram Shandy—*to date it has not been the subject of a dedicated anthology of critical essays. This volume fills that gap ...

Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne derives from the Laurence Sterne Tercentenary Conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on July 8–11, 2013. It was attended by some eighty scholars from fourteen countries; the conference heard more than sixty papers. The organizers invited participants to submit revised versions of their contributions for this volume, and the thirteen selected exhibit, it is hoped, the defining features both of the conference ...

Volume 26 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era travels beyond the usual discussions of power, identity, and cultural production to visit the purlieus and provinces of Britain’s literary empire. Bulging at its bindings are essays investigating out-of-the-way but influential ensembles, whether female religious enthusiasts, annotators of Maria Edgeworth’s underappreciated works, or modern video-based Islamic super-heroines energized by Mary Wollstone...

The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and intellectual life of one of the most challenging and wide-ranging writers in English literary history. Compiler of the first great English dictionary, editor of Shakespeare, biographer and critic of the English poets, author both of the influential journal Rambler and the popular fiction Rasselas, and one of the most engaging conversationalists in literary culture, Johnson is here ...

No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson--essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular ima...

Students, scholars, and general readers alike will find the New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson deeply informed and appealingly written. Each newly commissioned chapter explores aspects of Johnson's writing and thought, including his ethical grasp of life, his views of language, the roots of his ideas in Renaissance humanism, and his skeptical-humane style. Among the themes engaged are history, disability, gender, politics, race, slavery, Johnson's representation in art, and the sign...