Paul Goring

• Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The present, seventh, volume of the series "From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria" offers profitable re-visitations of old themes, as well as explorations of new themes and problems. The volume focuses on the literature, culture, and political and social history of Britain in a period when the structures of industrial modernity were being created, and...

In January 1772, the actor and playwright Charles Macklin suffered a major blow: much of his property was lost in a shipwreck off the Irish coast, including his books and personal manuscripts. James Kirkman, one of three early biographers of Macklin, recounted the misfortune: When Mr. Macklin left London, in 1771, he shipped all his furniture, pla...

Plays about fortune-hunters constitute one of the main subgenres of eighteenth-century comic drama. Uncovering a misattribution to the actor-playwright Charles Macklin of a 1750 farce, The Fortune-Hunters, this essay considers the phenomenon of fortune-hunting as a deceitful practice within the eighteenth-century marriage market and the reasons for...

What constitutes a legitimate disruption of an actor’s performance? In the 1770s this became a pressing question following the blighted attempt by Charles Macklin to stage Macbeth at Covent Garden, which resulted in one of theatre history’s most drawn out battles between a performer and the public. Beginning with the hissing of the elderly actor in...

This essay explores a selection of mid-eighteenth-century stage works, all of which have a starting point in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, in order to consider the term ‘adaptation’ and ways in which it is applied in contemporary Adaptation Studies. It suggests that the appropriation of narrative elements from a literary precursor remains pa...

The editors of the Florida Letters identify the recipient of Letter 242 as Laurence Sulivan (c.1713–1786), a high-ranking administrator of the East India Company and subscriber to the posthumous volumes of Sterne’s Sermons (1769). Their identification builds on the work of Lewis Perry Curtis, the editor of Letters of Laurence Sterne (1935), who pro...

Paul Goring demonstrates how eighteenth-century writers and performers, including Samuel Richardson, David Garrick and Laurence Sterne, were involved in the construction of innovative bourgeois ideals of sentimental eloquence in contrast to more patrician, classical bodily modes. Spanning oratory, theatre and the novel, Goring charts the growing li...

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES REPRESENTATIONS of Irishness on the eighteenth-century London stage as a basis for reconsidering the theater's role as a site of interethnic contest and negotiation. Ethnic interaction is thematized in numerous eighteenth-century plays - a tendency that highlights the function of the stage as a mediator of the social and cultu...

One consequence of the rise of Methodism in eighteenth-century Britain was the stimulation of rigorous debate over the propriety and effectiveness of conflicting preaching techniques Was Anglican delivery too reserved to be effective? Did ‘enthusiasm’ inspire eloquent oratory or dangerous mania? This article explores literary interventions into thi...

Within the narrative of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and yet at the same time running parallel to it, is the creation of Lily Briscoe's painting. As Lily draws the final stroke on her canvas, Virginia Woolf similarly completes the narrative. The painting becomes a paradigm of the verbal form that creates it. Within that verbal form, the pain...