The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Works of Tobias Smollett) - Softcover

Smollett, Tobias

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820315370 ISBN 13: 9780820315379

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1993

Synopsis

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett's last published novel and most celebrated work, appeared in June 1771, three months before the author's death. A classic in the history of the English novel, it takes the form of a collection of letters written by various members of Mr.Matthew Bramble's family, (for whom Humphry Clinker is a general servant) during their eight months travel in England and Scotland in the 1760s. The wanderings of the Bramble party result in a series of amusing adventures and episodes, unfolding within the main plot in which the eccentric and contentious characters - ""originals"" as Bramble's nephew calls them - discover the sources of true happiness. In this work, Smollett realised two long-standing artistic goals - a harmonious fusion of satire and comedy and, through the deliberate intertwining of historical and contrived details, a portrayal of the world as constructed from both fiction and fact. In achieving the latter, Smollett was aided by the novel's form, for the epistolary style of travel books in his day set a precedent for the extensive commentary on incidents, experiences, people, and place in ""Humphry Clinker"" and allowed him to relate stories through multiple points of view. This edition of ""Humphry Clinker"" includes illustrations by George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson and is the first scholarly edition to feature a comprehensive introduction, exhaustive textual editing, and detailed notes that cite passages from Smollett's nonfictional works and the works of his contemporaries to analyse the mass of allusions and references in the novel.

About this title

Review:

This is the first really significant scholarly edition of the last-published novel by Smollett, which includes some wonderful illustrations. . . . Nothing seems to have been overlooked by Preston and Brack here in their efforts to present to the modern reader the most authoritative edition.

--Choice

About the Author:

Tobias Smollett (Author) TOBIAS SMOLLETT (1721-1771) was a novelist, playwright, journalist, historian, travel writer, critic, translator, editor, and compiler--an eighteenth-century man of letters in the fullest sense of the phrase. O M Brack Jr. (Editor) O M BRACK, JR., a professor of English literature emeritus at Arizona State University, is coauthor of Samuel Johnson's Early Biographers and coeditor of The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson. He has edited volumes of the Works of Samuel Johnson published by Yale and is textual editor for the Georgia series the Works of Tobias Smollett. Brack is the curator of the 2009 Johnson tercentenary exhibition at the Huntington Library.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0820315370
• ISBN 13: 9780820315379
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 562