The evolution of English prose, 1700-1800 : style, politeness, and print culture / Carey McIntosh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McIntosh, Carey, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English prose literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English prose literature.

Women--Books and reading--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Women.

Literature publishing--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Literature publishing.

Written communication--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Written communication.

Literacy--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Literacy.

English language--18th century--Rhetoric.

English language.

English language--18th century--Style.

Courtesy in literature.

Great Britain--Intellectual life--18th century.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 276 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Between 1700 and 1800 English prose became more polite and less closely tied to speech. A large scale feminisation of literary and other values coincided with the development of a mature print culture; these two historical trends make themselves felt in the evolution of prose. In this book Carey McIntosh explores oral dimensions of written texts not only in writers such as Swift, Defoe and Astell, who have a strong colloquial base, but also in more bookish writers, including Shaftesbury, Johnson and Burke. After 1760, McIntosh argues, prose became more dignified and more self-consciously rhetorical. He examines the new correctness, sponsored by prescriptive grammars and Scottish rhetorics of the third quarter of the century; the new politeness, sponsored by women writers; and standardisation, which by definition encouraged precision and abstractness in language. This book offers support for a hypothesis that these are not only stylistic changes but also major events in the history of the language.

Contents:

1. The ordering of English. Hypotheses, contexts. Approaches. Cultural insecurity in the early eighteenth century. Cultural complacency in the later eighteenth century

2. Literacy and politeness: the gentrification of English prose. Early eighteenth-century prose. Late eighteenth-century prose. Orality and writtenness. Microscope and telescope

3. Testing the model. Defoe and Paine. Pope and Wordsworth. Astell and Wollstonecraft. Jonathan Swift. Edmund Burke. Shaftesbury

4. Loose and periodic sentences. What makes a sentence periodic? The domains of periodicity. Defoe and the syntax of accumulation. Joseph Addison

5. Lofty language and low. James Boswell. Decorum and genre and Boswell's Life.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-267) and index.

ISBN:

0-511-58279-X

0-511-00595-4