Bracketing Ephemera

Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and Eighteenth-Century Book Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID21408007
AuthorsRaphael Zähringer (0000-0001-5909-4564, University of Tübingen, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume71
Issue2
Pages159-173
Publication date2023-06-27
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueZeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0044-2305 • E-ISSN: 2196-4726
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/zaa-2023-2016
OpenAlexW4379520171
LanguageEN
References cited19

The article seeks to conceive of Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750) as a hybrid text that employs certain (formal) elements of what was to become ‘the realist novel’ as integrative bracketing mechanisms for the text’s more ephemeral as well as fantastical and subversive aspects. To do so, the article builds on recent research on the realist novel which has dragged into the light the intricacies and interdependencies of the seemingly clear-cut categories of formal realism and ephemeral writing. Accordingly, texts such as Peter Wilkins can be treated as sites of exchange or integration between these modes of writing. The article moves from the emerging divide between ‘the novel’ and ephemera in the mid-eighteenth century to Paltock’s frame narrative and to paratextual devices as well as the metaphorical function of flight. By doing so, it will be shown that Paltock’s integrative approach in Peter Wilkins hinges on a deep awareness of the bias between realist and ephemeral/fantastical writing

Adventure · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Bracketing (phenomenology) · Ephemera · Ephemeral key · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Poetics · Poetry · Realism · Sociology · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Lexicography and Language Studies · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy

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