Books in the Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850 series

Examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth's poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialogue with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth's career and its place in the canon.

The book offers new perspectives on works that were central to the visual and literary culture of the Anglo-American world-ephemeral print-but which have received little scholarly attention in the past.

This collection reinvigorates Sheridan studies by presenting his spectacular life and extraordinary works in the intricate political, social, and cultural context of Georgian London. The author of The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, and the The Critic was also an innovative theatrical manager, a flashy profligate, and the mainstay of political opposition in the decisive decades of the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries.

Tobias Smollett (1721-71) is best known today as a novelist. In the eighteenth-century, he was principally regarded as a historian and critic. In this book, Richard J. Jones explores the diversity of Smollett's journalistic and literary writings. In doing so, he establishes new connections between Smollett's work and contemporary writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Smollett is presented, much like the philosopher David Hume, as a Scot in London, writing history and critical essays. The book takes as its focal point Smollett's visit to Nice, between 1763 and 1765, and the account he wrote of it in Travels through France and Italy (1766). This account is usually seen as a 'travel narrative'. However, Jones argues that it should more properly be read as 'pocket encyclopedia' in the tradition of Voltaire. Jones offers a productive juxtaposition of authors, texts, and contexts for readers interested in questions of genre, Enlightenment thought, and the cosmopolitan nature of eighteenth-century culture.

Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal,1600-1800 explores the oppositions created by the official exclusion of banned sexual practices and the resistance to that exclusion through widespread acceptance of those outlawed practices at an interpersonal level.

Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century. Unique to the British eighteenth century, the periodical is of great value to scholars of English cultural studies because it offers a venue where authors hash out, often in extremely dramatic terms, what they think it should take to be a writer, what their relationship with their new mass-media audience ought to be, and what qualifications should act as gatekeepers to the profession. Exploring these questions in The Female Spectator, The Drury-Lane Journal,The Midwife, The World, The Covent-Garden Journal, and other periodicals of the early and mid-eighteenth century, Manushag Powell examines several ';paper wars' waged between authors. At the height of their popularity, essay periodicals allowed professional writers to fashion and make saleable a new kind of narrative and performative literary personality, the eidolon, and arguably birthed a new cult of authorial personality. In Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals, Powell argues that the coupling of persona and genre imposes a lifespan on the periodical text; the periodicals don't only rise and fall, but are born, and in good time, they die.

The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerfuland for that reason, contestedways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meaning. The regular progression of chronological time accentuated the deviance of anachronism and ephemerality, while the opposition of unique artifacts to ubiquitous commodities exoticized things that straddled this divide.Inspired by the authentic products as well as the anomalous by-products of contemporary scholarship, writers, craftsmen, and shoppers appropriated the past to create nostalgic and ironic alternatives to their own moment. Barrett Kalter explores the history of these ';modern antiques,' including Dryden's translation of Virgil, modernizations of The Canterbury Tales, Gray's Gothic wallpaper, and Walpole's Strawberry Hill. Though grounded in the ancient and medieval eras, these works uncannily addressed the controversies about monarchy, nationhood, commerce, and specialized knowledge that defined the present for the English eighteenth century. Bringing together literary criticism, historiography, material culture studies, and book history, Kalter argues that the proliferation of modern antiques in the period reveals modernity's paradoxical emergence out of encounters with the past.