Published only a few weeks before Laurence Sterne’s death, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick featured a parson character made famous in Sterne’s first novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the title later shortened… Read More ›
Tobias Smollett’s first novel reflected both the reading interests of the day and Smollett’s own attitude toward fiction. As a picaresque with first-person narration, the novel offered readers an action-centered story with a rogue main character, but Roderick Random could… Read More ›
Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling owed a debt to Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). Like Smollett’s protagonist, the good-hearted Harley of Mackenzie’s tale is a naive traveler in a too-sophisticated world, sacrificed to professional cardsharps. A narrator that readers… Read More ›
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
Thomas Love Peacock published his first novel, Headlong Hall, anonymously, reflecting in it his dislike of progress and all of its “new-fangled” ideas. In what would become a regular approach for Peacock, Headlong Hall presents a satiric discussion in Platonic… Read More ›
William Makepeace Thackeray’s first novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century by Fitz-Boodle [The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.], appeared in Fraser’s Magazine as a monthly serial in 1844. It was later revised and released… Read More ›
A label often applied to the last half of the 18th century, the Age of Johnson takes its name from Samuel Johnson, lexicographer, critic, scholar, poet, and novelist most well known for his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1755). With… Read More ›
The Spanish words picaresque and picaro achieved currency in Spain shortly after 1600. Today they are terms in literary criticism, sometimes misused because of the vague meaning attached to them. The revival of the genre in the twentieth century was… Read More ›
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