18th Century Fiction
A very useful and readable book...
Library Journal
This unique, scholarly collection of essays painstakingly examines the writing of Thoreau, comparing him with other environmental writers and stressing literary scholarship within environmental studies. In this lofty collection of essays edited by Schneider (English, Wartburg Coll.), critics and followers of Thoreau break apart his writing to investigate, word by word, the biocentric and anthropocentric nature of his works. The collection emphasizes four distinct themes on place: relating, imagining, socially constructing, and saving. It compares Thoreau s writing to that of such other authors as Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey. Fascinating discourses compare the poetry of Wendell Berry as well as the paintings of the first generation of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Recommended for academic libraries. Joyce Sparrow, Juvenile Welfare Board Lib., Pinellas Park, FL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A scholarly biography focusing on the literary career of the pioneering novelist (1752-1840). Thaddeus (History and Literature/Harvard) begins with an anxious moment: returning to England from France in 1812, Burney is confronted by a police officer who demands to know the significance of the myriad manuscript pages she has. (They are in fact three volumes of her novel-in-progress, The Wanderer.) But a "strong and confident" Burney cows the official, "controlling" him as easily as she manipulates her texts. There have been, asserts Thaddeus, three principal critical views of Burney: a writer who "fears to do no wrong," one who "represses her rage," and one who "unleashes her rage." To understand her work more comprehensively, it is necessary, says Thaddeus, to employ all three. Having established this critical framework, Thaddeus proceeds through the life of "protean Burney," following her from childhood in her close, artistic family to the publication of her first novel (the epistolary Evelina) to her second and even more popular novel Cecilia (with its "half-mad" narrator) to her dreary life as an attendant to Queen Charlotte (a position that made her "so frail with misery that she nearly died"), and on through her marriage, motherhood, celebrity (among her fans were Byron, Scott, and Godwin), and later works (including an ill-reviewed play, Edwy and Elgiva). Thaddeus provides an important service by summarizing and analyzing Burney's little-known works—sometimes more thoroughly than engagingly. But readers will emerge convinced of both the importance and novelty of Burney's work.Thaddeus alsoreveals humor and irony and pain in Burney's life (e.g., her future husband wrote a "paean to the joys of masturbation," and with only a "wine cordial" anesthetic, she endured a brutal mastectomy). Thaddeus's meticulous research and sound argument should secure for Burney a more prominent place in the pride of literary lions.. . .
