Fathoming Intelligence: The "Impartial" Novelist and the Passion for News in Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom

Kahan, Lee

doi:10.1353/ecf.0.0045

Cited by 1 publication

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“…What holds things together, according to Smollett (a little further on from the quotation from Ferdinand Count Fathom above), is “a principal personage,” which might well be identified with the author himself. In a recent essay, Lee F. Kahan has taken this approach to Ferdinand Count Fathom , seeing Smollett as mediator and Ferdinand as the embodiment of anxiety about “periodical intelligence”: Ferdinand becomes “the grotesque personification of the fragmented, empty, and meaningless nature of his ‘universal knowledge’ and its magazine form” (, pp. 255–256)—something which Smollett was always trying to shape and control.…”

Section: The Work Of the Novelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tobias Smollett and the work of writing

Jones

2018

Literature Compass

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This essay offers an overview of the state of Smollett Studies today. It is also an argument about what makes Tobias Smollett interesting. It therefore seeks to avoid the value judgments about “English literature” that have dogged Smollett's reputation (ever since “English literature” was invented) and restore him to the “work of writing” in which he was engaged. The essay thus provides an account of the wide‐ranging nature of his work in order to balance a previous critical emphasis on his novels. It includes some views of his role as a translator, historian, critic, editor, and, perhaps more provocatively, “hack.” Recent studies in eighteenth‐century print culture and the (Scottish) Enlightenment point the way to a new Smollett, at work within a messier history of writing.

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Section: The Work Of the Novelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tobias Smollett and the work of writing

Jones

2018

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Fathoming Intelligence: The "Impartial" Novelist and the Passion for News in Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom

Cited by 1 publication

References 19 publications

Tobias Smollett and the work of writing

Tobias Smollett and the work of writing

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