Sociable Criticism in England explores how from 1625 to 1725 cultural practices and discourses of sociability (rules for small-group discussion, friendship discourse, and patron-client relationships) determined the venues within which critical judgments were rendered, disseminated, and received. It establishes how individuals operating in small groups were authorized to circulate critical judgments and commentary, why certain modes of critical exchange were treated as beyond the ken of good social manners, and how such expectations were subverted or manipulated to avoid the imputation that individuals had violated the standards for offering public criticism. Philips, George Villiers, John Dryden, Lady Margaret Cavendish, John Dennis, and Joseph Addison, this study argues that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century criticism could circulate either orally, in manuscript, or in print so long as it appeared to originate in interpersonal encounters considered appropriate to critical discussion.

This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period. It is based on a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 to 1725. Correspondents include a significant sampling from among antiquarians, natural scientists, poets and dramatists, philosophers and mathematicians, political and religious controversialists. The author addresses how early modern letter writing practices (sometimes known as letteracy) and theories of friendship were important underpinnings of the actions and the roles that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century authors and readers used to communicate their needs and views to their social networks. These early modern social conditions combined with an emerging view of the manuscript as a seedbed of knowledge production and humanistic creation that had significant financial and cultural value in England’s mercantilist economy. Because literary networks bartered such gains in cultural capital for state patronage as well as for social and financial gains, this placed a burden on an author’s associates to aid him or her in seeing that work into print, a circumstance that reinforced the collaborative formulae outlined in letter writing handbooks and friendship discourse. Thus, the author’s network was more and more viewed as a tightly knit group of near equals that worked collaboratively to grow social and symbolic capital for its associates, including other authors, readers, patrons and regulators. Such internal methods for bartering social and cultural capital within literary networks gave networked authors a strong hand in the emerging market economy for printed works, as major publishers such as Bernard Lintott and Jacob Tonson relied on well-connected authors to find new writers as well as to aid them in seeing such major projects as Pope’s The Iliad into print.

The Social Life of Criticism explores the cultural representation of the female critic in Victorian Britain, focusing especially on how women writers imagined themselves—in literary essays, periodical reviews, and even works of fiction—as participants in complex networks of literary exchange. Kimberly Stern proposes that in response to the “male collectivity” prominently featured in critical writings, female critics adopted a social and sociological understanding of the profession, often reimagining the professional networks and communities they were so eager to join. This engaging study begins by looking at the eighteenth century, when critical writing started to assume the institutional and generic structures we associate with it today, and examines a series of case studies that illuminate how women writers engaged with the forms of intellectual sociability that defined nineteenth-century criticism—including critical dialogue, the club, the salon, and the publishing firm. In doing so, it clarifies the fascinating rhetorical and political debates surrounding the figure of the female critic and charts how women writers worked both within and against professional communities. Ultimately, Stern contends that gender was a formative influence on critical practice from the very beginning, presenting the history of criticism as a history of gender politics. While firmly grounded in literary studies, The Social Life of Criticism combines an attention to historical context with a deep investment in feminist scholarship, social theory, and print culture. The book promises to be of interest not only to professional academics and graduate students in nineteenth-century literature but also to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including literature, intellectual history, cultural studies, gender theory, and sociology.

This volume presents a ground-breaking overview of the interconnections between socio-cultural reality and language practices, by looking at the different ways in which social roles are performed, maintained, adopted and assigned through linguistic means. The introductory chapter discusses and evaluates different theoretical approaches to the question, and the eight articles by leading scholars in the field offer a multiplicity of methodological and theoretical approaches to the description and interpretation of social roles as expressed in a variety of texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the specific period covered is Late Modern English, the theoretical insights offered will be of interest to any linguist interested in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and the history of English, as well as scholars in the social sciences and social history interested in the concept and realisation of roles.

Early literary criticism was undisciplined. Unlike the staid essays and monographs of later academic scholarship, English criticism first appeared in the contentious world of the London theater: dramatists and other poets argued about their craft in contending prefaces and dedications, and their disputes spilled into the public sphere in pamphlet wars, mock epics, lampoons, and even novels. Across these forms, criticism was personal, political, and unconcerned with analysis for its own sake. Yet this unruly discourse laid the groundwork both for modern literary criticism and for the discipline of literary studies. The Invention of English Criticism explores the earliest uses of criticism and the attempts by some to convert a field of literary debate into an archive of useful knowledge. Criticism's undisciplined past thus illuminates its contested, ambivalent, and never fully disciplined present.

The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity of a critic"—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

This timely anthology offers a broad selection of critical texts - introductions, prefaces, periodical essays, literary reviews - written by women of the Romantic era. The collection offers fuel for some of the most topical debates in British Romantic period studies including professionalism, nationalism and the literary canon.