Common Ground: Eighteenth-century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor - Hardcover

Frank, Judith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804729085 ISBN 13: 9780804729086

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The author reads four 18th-century satiric novels-Joseph Andrews, A Sentimental Journey, Humphrey Clinker, and Cecilia-"from below," exploring how the gentle authors' experiences of the poor shape the novels both thematically and formally.

About this title

Synopsis:

Work on both the satire and the fiction of the English eighteenth century has tended to focus on the transition from a patrician culture to a culture dominated by the logic of the market. This book shifts the focus from the struggle between aristocratic and bourgeois values to another set of important, yet usually unremarked, class relations: those between the gentle classes and the poor. The author reads four eighteenth-century satiric novels Henry Fielding s Joseph Andrews, Laurence Sterne s A Sentimental Journey, Tobias Smollett s Humphrey Clinker, and Frances Burney s Cecilia from below, exploring the ways in which the gentle authors experiences of the poor shape the novels both thematically and formally. The author argues that in these novels the mental structures of gentlemen and gentlewomen characters are formed through acts of imitation of and identification with the poor.

About the Author:

Judith Frank is Associate Professor of English at Amherst College

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0804729085
• ISBN 13: 9780804729086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 246