Abstract:James Campbell's A Treatise of Modern Faulconry appeared in 1773, accompanied by an anonymous Preface and a long, anonymous Introduction. The Preface ignores the Treatise and offers a burlesque of the first volume of Lord Monboddo's The Origin and Progress of Language; the Introduction offers fantastic tales of falconry that scarcely resemble the actual practice. This essay argues that the Preface was written by Alexander Gillies, a Presbyterian minister, and the Introduction by William Smellie, the printer and natural historian. However, authorial attribution is but one portion of the story. It is shown that both men had some antipathy to falconry, that Gillies held deep reasons for challenging the thought of Monboddo, and that Smellie maintained long-standing concerns about the treatment of animals. In this way, these paratexts also enter eighteenth-century debates on the status of the human and the animal.
The Age of SubTleTy is guided by the fundamental question, “How do the operations of conceits relate to nature’s operations?” (184), and by the key premise that the early modern conceit ( conceptus , concetto , concepto ) took shape in tandem with contemporary shifts in scientific sensibilities. In developing his analy...
Chen-Yu Li· Bulletin of the Comediantes· 0 citations
This article examines two contemporary eighteenth-century editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare: David Garrick’s stage adaptation (1763) and Samuel Johnson’s critical edition (1765). Challenging the view that textual variation is primarily explained by chronological distance from the moment of au...
Set in the Bermuda Triangle, Grace Tiffany’s novel Ariel (published in 2005) originally appropriates the Shakespearean romance, providing a long prequel to the hypotext’s dramatized events and rewriting its story. The novel centres on Ariel, whose origin is now that of a spirit born from the hallucinated brain of a Jew...
Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and, by common consent, his most concentrated study of a mind in the act of undoing itself. This article argues that the play's famous linguistic doubleness its riddling prophecies, its paradoxes of fair and foul, its obsession with words that mean two things at once is not mer...
Manjula K. T.· International Journal of Eng...· 0 citations
In his early youth, Dostoevsky recognized a single life purpose for himself: to comprehend the mystery of man and the mystery of God. Such a life’s task inevitably presupposed an engagement with the books of the European esoteric tradition and, consequently, their functional presence in the writer’s works. In particula...
Tatyana A. Kasatkina· Studia litteraria· 0 citations
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