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SUMMARY:'Smelfungus Smollett' and Reception Theory - Professor George Rous
 seau\, Oxford
DTSTART:20100429T160000Z
DTEND:20100429T180000Z
UID:TALK23828@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA
DESCRIPTION:During the eighteenth century Scottish-born Tobias Smollett (1
 721-1771)\, novelist\, journalist\, social commentator and physician\, was
  considered a canonical writer together with Samuel Richardson\, Henry Fie
 lding\, Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott judged Smollett'
 s comic novels superior to Fielding's for their mirth (although Scottish n
 ationalism probably played a part in this estimate)\, and Charles Dickens\
 , George Eliot and Henry James later praised his craft of fiction for its 
 modes of narrative experimentalism. But Smollett's critical fortunes decli
 ned in the twentieth century\, in part for his representations of duplicit
 y and vice in our century\, whose more recent varieties of barbarism and v
 iolence doubtlessly matched his own century's. This discussion maps Smolle
 tt's rise and fall\, and considers the widening rift between his quasi-can
 onical status within academia and in the public domain where he has droppe
 d out altogether\, and then moves on to speculate if\, and in what critica
 l ways\, it is possible that he speaks at all to us today.\n\n*George Rous
 seau* has written about a variety of eighteenth-century prose forms\, in l
 iterature especially the works of Smollett\, Fielding\, Goldsmith\, Sterne
  and the novelists of sense and sensibility. His _Tobias Smollett: Essays 
 of Two Decades_ (Edinburgh) appeared in 1982\, and Oxford University Press
  published his and the late P. G. Boucé's _Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial 
 Essays_ in 1971. His forthcoming biography of Sir John Hill\, one of Smoll
 ett's principal antagonists\, appears next year. Other books include a tri
 logy entitled _Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses: medical\, scientific\, ant
 hropological_ (1991)\; (with Roy Porter) _Gout: The Patrician Malady_ (199
 8)\; _Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History_ (2003)\; _Nervous
  Acts: Essays on Literature\, Culture and Sensibility_ (2004)\, _Marguerit
 e Yourcenar_ (2004)\, and _Children and Sexuality: The Greeks to the Great
  War_ (2007). He is based at the University of Oxford where he the Co-Dire
 ctor of the Centre for the History of Childhood.\n\nThe Reading and Recept
 ion Studies Seminar meets regularly in Cambridge and at the School of Adva
 nced Studies\, University of London\, and is convened by Dr Elinor Shaffer
  FBA. http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/index.php?id=333\n\nThe 18th Century 
 and Romantic Studies Seminar is convened by Dr Fred Parker and Dr Mina Gor
 ji.\nhttp://www.english.cam.ac.uk/seminars/rom.htm
LOCATION:Room GR 06/07\, ground floor\, English Faculty (Sidgwick site)\, 
 9 West Road\, Cambridge CB3
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