Bøger udgivet af University Press Copublishing Division

Seeking to honor and extend the critical legacy of Howard Weinbrot, this volume re-examines, rebuilds, and upgrades the most prominent pillars of long eighteenth-century scholarship. The collection is divided into four thematic sections, beginning with a series of chapters offering fresh analyses of Swift, Dryden, Hogarth, and other major authors and artists of the period. In the sections that follow, the contributors not only explore biographies of both highly esteemed figures and notorious deviants, but also investigate the very concept of Enlightenment as it has evolved from the eighteenth century to today. The final section features chapters that probe the complex interaction of identity, persona, and place, traversing the countless locales in which the British-and the international-eighteenth century emerged. The volume ultimately covers a range of experience that extends from the gallows to the landscape garden and from heroic antiquity to Romantic-era France. Juxtaposing the local and particular against the grand and universal, Howard Weinbrot and the Precincts of Enlightenment testifies to the complexity and ongoing significance of eighteenth-century culture.

Exploratory and energetically analytical, 1650-1850 ranges over the expanse of long eighteenth-century culture. Welcoming research on all nations and language traditions, this annual escorts its readers into a truly global Enlightenment. Volume 29 includes essays on familiar topics such as Samuel Johnson and women's education while it also showcases Sir Joseph Banks's globetrotting and provides a vivaciously interdisciplinary special feature on the cultural implications of water. Capping it all off is a diverse bevy of robust, full-length book reviews.

The essays in The Secret Life of Things approach it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike, from various theoretical and historical vantage points. While sketching the cultural biography of a neglected literary form, these wide-ranging essays both enrich and complicate the history of prose fiction in the second half of the eighteenth century.