18th Century Books

The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (Penguin Classics)

William Hill Brown, Hannah Webster Foster

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin Classics Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $0.31

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Short Stories -> Anthologies
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Short Stories -> United States

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, The Power of Sympathy (1789) and The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in America. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy reflects eighteenth-century America's preoccupation with the role of women as safekeepers of the country's morality. A novel about the dangers of succumbing to sexual temptations and the rewards of resistance, it was meant to promote women's moral rectitude, and the letters through which the story is told are filled with advice on the proper relationships between the sexes. Like The Power of Sympathy, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is concerned with womanly virtue. Eliza Wharton is eager to enjoy a bit of freedom before settling down to domestic life and begins a flirtation with the handsome, rakish Sanford. Their letters trace their relationship from its romantic beginnings to the transgression that inevitably brings their exclusion from proper society. In her Introduction, Carla Mulford discusses the novels' importance in the development of American literature and as vivid reflections of the goal to establish a secure republic built on the virtue of its citizens.

Kelroy: A Novel (Early American Women Writers)

Rebecca Rush

List Price: $12.95 By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $3.19

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Poetry -> Anthologies
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Poetry -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works of fiction by eighteenth- and nineteenth century women, each reprinted in its entirety, each introduced by Cathy N. Davidson, who places it in an historical and literary perspective. Ranging from serious cautionary tales about moral corruption to amusing and trenchant social satire, these novels provide today's reader with a unique window into the earliest American popular fiction and way of life.
Set in Philadelphia, elroy focuses on the limited options for women in early nineteenth century America. The plot revolves around the dilemma of Mrs. Hamilton, who is suddenly left penniless by the unexpected death of her wealthy husband. Not willing to live in poverty, Mrs. Hamilton sees as her only available recourse her two unmarried daughters. As the daughters make the rounds of the marriage market and suffer the machinations of their mother, Kelroy exposes the contradictions of class interest and the profound limitations women suffered in the political and social economies of the early Republican years.
This is the first time Rebecca Rush's novel has been available since the printing of the original, single edition in 1812. With an illuminating introduction by Dana D. Nelson, this exceptional novel is certain to shed new light on the role of women, as well as the state of fiction, in early America.

The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club (Three Volume Set)

Alexander Hamilton

Amazon Price: $275.00 List Price: $275.00 Usually ships in 3 to 5 weeks By: University of North Carolina Press Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $19.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

The Dark Chamber

Leonard Cline

Amazon Price: $6.99 List Price: $6.99 Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks By: Cold Spring Press Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $1.23

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> United States
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Horror -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Jungian Gothic Horror 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

"The Dark Chamber" is full-blooded Gothic horror and a classic tale of Promethean ruin. Cline has his tongue firmly in his cheek at times and is deadly serious at others; Richard Pride, an independently wealthy thinker, has an odd theory about human memory and the function it serves. He believes that it is possible through all manner of reminiscence to scan ancestral memory and do a sort of time travel through the tunnel of dreams.

To this end he isolates himself in a mansion, Mordance Hall, with an embittered wife unnaturally interested in astrology, a jealous alcoholic secretary, his whimsical daughter Janet, and a particularly nasty dog named Tod (the German word for death). Narrating all this is our dubious protagonist Oscar, a conceited musician who is called upon by Pride to construct a symphony which will penetrate his subconscious and further his dangerous goal.

This novel reads like a bleaker "Against the Grain" at times, and at others it degenerates into decadent soap opera. Oscar's pathetic attempt to sleep with every woman in the house distracts from the disorienting nature of what is taking place in the mansion as things go from bad to worse, Oscar slowly losing his sanity and Pride becoming more and more of an unseen but increasingly sinister figure every chapter. The scenes that involve Richard Pride, his bizarre accounts of "ancestral memory" and obscure, nomad-like past are where Cline reaches his horrific height. He is the mad puppeteer of this beautiful dementia, and serves as the perfect backdrop for the surreal degeneration of each character.

Though it starts out a little weak and meandering, the last half of the novel is unforgettable and shows what tremendous potential Cline had as an author of weird fiction, tragically cut short by imprisonment and a subsequent psychological breakdown. Flaws aside, this is essential bizarre literature.

Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861 (Reencounters With Colonialism)

Michelle Burnham

Amazon Price: $22.95 List Price: $22.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Dartmouth Amazon Marketplace: 38 new & used starting at $2.91

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

Examines how traditional dichotomies give way to emergent cultural forms in the literature of captivity.

The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction

Ann Charters

List Price: $44.05 By: Bedford/St Martins Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Short Stories -> United States

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Course Book I Actually Want to Keep Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This compilation of short stories was used for my Intro. to the Short Story college course. Our professor only picked out certain stories but I found myself reading unassigned stories myself. Some of these stories are wonderful. My favorite was "The Widow's Son" by Mary Lavin. Some other noteworthy stories: "Hills Like White Elephants" Hemingway, "Girl" by J. Kincaid. Too many more to list, a course book I am actually keeping so I can finish reading it. Usually I can't wait to close them after the course and not see them anymore! :)

Editorial Review:

During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Accordingly, her choice of fiction in the first edition of her The Story and Its Writer was as notable for its student appeal as it was for its quality and range. And to complement these stories, she introduced a lasting innovation: an array of the writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story. In subsequent editions her sense of what works was confirmed as the book evolved into the most comprehensive, diverse-- and bestselling -- introduction to fiction anthology. Instructors rely on Ann Charters' ability to assemble an authoritative and teachable anthology, and anticipate each edition's selection of new writers and stories.

States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel

Elizabeth Barnes

List Price: $76.00 By: Columbia University Press Amazon Marketplace: 2 new & used starting at $147.05

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Movements & Periods -> General AAS

Editorial Review:

From the Declaration of Independence to the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the poetry of Wait Whitman, American writers have etched an archetypal character into the national psyche. For centuries the "rugged individual" was thought to be the keystone of the national identity, informing history, culture, literature, and democracy. But is this belief illusionary? Is American identity more collectively defined? With insightful readings of early American novels, Elizabeth Barnes challenges the traditional concept of American self-identity and the underpinnings of American life. In place of the masculine "rugged individual" she reveals a more social, cooperative American. Barnes identifies a collective identity consciously fashioned by early writers who held to the Enlightenment belief that bonds of sympathy were the strongest foundation of a republican democracy. Authors like Hawthorne and Susanna Rawson, Barnes argues, employed a sentimental rhetorical strategy that engendered feelings of sympathy between the reader and the subject, which in turn created a culture strongly supported by familial bonds for and among Americans. Barnes also discusses works cautioning against seduction or promoting filial devotion, such as A New England Tale and The Lamplighter. By viewing the texts through a feminist lens, she contends that they substantiated traditional patriarchal dominance by invoking a sense of obedience to authority -- whether government authority or male hegemony in American society. This fresh interpretation of American literature recasts long-standing assumptions of literary theory, literature, criticism, and the culture of American democracy.

Hour Of Judgment (The Executioner)

Don Pendleton

List Price: $4.99 By: Gold Eagle Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Action & Adventure
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Genre Fiction -> Men's Adventure
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Short Stories -> United States

The Tuesday Club: A Shorter Edition of The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club by Dr. Alexander Hamilton (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf)

List Price: $52.00 By: The Johns Hopkins University Press Amazon Marketplace: 2 new & used starting at $69.03

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Irrelevant erudition, happy insult, and plain silliness... In parts it is remarkably funny, and filled with wonderful lampooning and absurd event. The crude illustrations, done with pen-and-wash, are full of jollity and life."--Times Literary Supplement.

When in 1745 Dr. Alexander Hamilton (no relation to Washington's treasury secretary) founded the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, he hoped to bring part of the culture of his native Edinburgh to this "barbarous and desolate corner of the world." For the next eleven years Hamilton scrupulously recorded the often tumultuous meetings of a club whose only sacrosanct bylaw was that no serious question could be given a serious answer. The result was a voluminous account rich with colorful detail and brimming with good humor, literary parody, tongue-in-cheek cultural criticism, and pointed political satire.

First published in 1990 in a three-volume edition that won widespread critical acclaim, this remarkable literary and cultural document is now available in an abridged paperback version that retains the wit, flavor, and charm of the original. Students of early American history and literature as well as general readers interested in the period will now find accessible one of British America's true literary achievements, a work that brings the golden age of the colonial Chesapeake wonderfully to life.

"Begin in the middle of the Book & read backwards, then forwards & skip about; I think now & then you will find something that will set you aroaring."--James Carroll, donating manuscript of "Record of the Tuesday Club" to a member of the Baltimore Library Company, May 4, 1824

The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel

Julia A. Stern

Amazon Price: $65.00 List Price: $65.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University Of Chicago Press Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $59.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Social Psychology & Interactions
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 19th Century -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Classics -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

American novels written in the wake of the Revolution overflow with self-conscious theatricality and impassioned excess. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern shows that these sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic works can be read as an emotional history of the early republic, reflecting the hate, anger, fear, and grief that tormented the Federalist era.

Stern argues that these novels gave voice to a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the foreclosure of liberty for the nation's noncitizens—women, the poor, Native and African Americans. Properly placed in the context of late eighteenth-century thought, the republican novel emerges as essentially political, offering its audience gothic and feminized counternarratives to read against the dominant male-authored accounts of national legitimation.

Drawing upon insights from cultural history and gender studies as well as psychoanalytic, narrative, and genre theory, Stern convincingly exposes the foundation of the republic as an unquiet crypt housing those invisible Americans who contributed to its construction.