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Common Ground : Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor by Judith Frank is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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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. The four novels all concern, in varying degrees of explicitness, the ways the poor were despised and denied politically and socially: the curtailing of popular festivity, the shift from a paternalist to a contractual model of service, the social dislocations caused by enclosure, and the commodificati

Who reads Common Ground : Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor?

Author

Judith Frank

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published

2022

Language

EN

ISBN

9781503616400

Category

nonfiction