The Novels of Tobias Smollett

What did it mean to be British, and more specifically to feel British, in the century following the Parliamentary Union of Scotland and England? Juliet Shields departs from recent accounts of the Romantic emergence of nationalism by recovering the terms in which eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century writers understood nationhood. She argues that, in the wake of the turmoil surrounding the Union, Scottish writers appealed to sentiment, or refined feeling, to imagine the nation as a community. They sought to transform a Great Britain united by political and economic interests into one united by shared sympathies, even while they used the gendered and racial connotations of sentiment to differentiate sharply between Scottish, English, and British identities. By moving Scotland from the margins to the center of literary history, the book explores how sentiment shaped both the development of British identity and the literature within which writers responded creatively to the idea of nationhood.

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Eighteenth-Century Illustrations of the Novels of Tobias Smollett

Fung¹

2014

Eighteenth-Century Life

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For most modern readers, Tobias Smollett’s novels are defined by violence and crude physical humor, both of which contribute to angry satire on society’s vices. By drawing attention to eighteenth-century illustrations in Smollett’s novels, I want to suggest that illustrators were engaged in their own interpretations of Smollett. Their images often criticize the texts they illustrate, and the readings they generate are alternative interpretive possibilities that the illustrators presumably deemed valid. While some of the passages chosen for illustration contribute to Smollett’s grumpy attack upon humankind, many other kinds of scenes, such as sentimental or gently humorous ones, were also illustrated. In this article, I propose that paying attention to what these illustrators thought important will open up new ways of approaching these texts.

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The Novels of Tobias Smollett

Cited by 11 publications

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Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820

Eighteenth-Century Illustrations of the Novels of Tobias Smollett

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