Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

  • Chapter 5 - Theodore Hook’s Sayings and Doings on the Page and the Stage

  • Angela Esterhammer, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Print and Performance in the 1820s
    Published online:
    11 March 2020
    Print publication:
    20 February 2020, pp 112-142

  • Summary

    Journalist, playwright, novelist, and English improvvisatore, Theodore Hook tapped into readers’ interest in representations of fashionable life with his Sayings and Doings (1824–8). Hook’s stories – influenced by his political journalism and theatrical experience and sometimes adapted for the stage – engage fundamental questions about speech, action, and personal identity. They constitute a hybrid genre of sociological documentary and imaginative fiction by an observer who stands both inside and outside the world he depicts. While William Hazlitt popularized the term “silver–fork fiction” in his reviews of Hook, the tendency to assimilate Sayings and Doings to later, longer silver–fork novels has obscured what is innovative about Hook’s fictional debut and how it embodies the distinctive climate of the 1820s. Sayings and Doings is an experimental hybrid of fiction, social critique, and metafiction that combines techniques of representation from theatre, improvisational performance, and newspaper journalism.

  • John Bull and the American Revolution: The Transatlantic Afterlives of Arbuthnot's Character

  • Leah Orr
  • Journal:
    Journal of British Studies / Volume 56 / Issue 1 / January 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    13 January 2017, pp. 51-69
    Print publication:
    January 2017

  • How did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.