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With their appearance during the 1760s, the five instalments of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman caused something like a booksellers’ hype. Small publishers and anonymous imitators seized on Sterne’s success by bringing out great numbers of spurious new volumes, critical or ironic pamphlets, and works that in style and title express a congeniality with Tristram Shandy. This study explores these eighteenth-century imitations as indicators of contemporary assumptions about Sterne’s intentions. Comparisons between the original, the first reactions, and a number of late eighteenth-century imitations, show that Tristram Shandy was initially read against the background of Augustan and Grub-street satire. The earliest imitators harked back to traditions of banter and folklore, bawdy and grotesque humour, pathetic stories and orthodox religiosity, reaffirming a pattern of moral and aesthetic values that was conservative for its time. Philosophical Sentimentalism appears to have been a late development. It is also argued that, partly because of their bad reputation, some of the authors of forgeries and parodies had a greater influence on the original than the reviewers to whom Sterne is often said to have listened. The imitators followed leads and themes in the first instalments, developing them according to their own conception of Sterne’s project and the reasons for his success. As a consequence, they unintentially put a pressure on Sterne to alter his course, and even to abandon some of the narrative lines and themes he had set out for himself. The literature section contains a chronological checklist of English eighteenth-century Sterneana.
In this carefully researched work, Gerald Kahan traces the genesis, development, and production history of a delightful and important eighteenth-century theatre piece, The Lecture on Heads. The Lecture was first presented in London in 1764 and became a staple in the English-speaking theaters of the world for the remainder of the eighteenth century. It amassed a fortune for its creator, George Alexander Stevens, was copied and adapted by dozens of performers, and went through forty published editions, authentic and spurious. Kahan studies the theatrical and cultural backgrounds that influenced the contents, development, and popularity of the Lecture. His exhaustive research has produced the most comprehensive and accurate published account of Stevens's life and career as well as a bibliography of his works. In addition, readers will find one of the earliest printed texts of the Lecture and a scholarly chronological listing of hundreds of its performances and many of its variations, including information on dates, cities, theaters, actors, ticket prices, and critical reviews.
The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.