Title: Common Ground
First published: 1997
Description: Work on both the satire and the fiction of the English eighteenth century has tended to focus on the transition from a patrician culture to a culture dominated by the logic of the market. This book shifts the focus from the struggle between aristocratic and bourgeois values to another set of important, yet usually unremarked, class relations: those between the gentle classes and the poor.

The author reads four eighteenth-century satiric novels - Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, and Frances Burney's Cecilia - "from below," exploring the ways in which the gentle authors' experiences of the poor shape the novels both thematically and formally. The author argues that in these novels the mental structures of gentlemen and gentlewomen characters are formed through acts of imitation of and identification with the poor.
Subjects: Literature and society, Social classes in literature, Satire, English, History and criticism, Poor in literature, English Satire, English fiction, Social conditions, Poverty in literature, History, English literature, history and criticism, 18th century, English fiction, history and criticism, 18th century, Great britain, social conditions, Satire, history and criticism, Roman anglais, Histoire et critique, Pauvreté dans la littérature, Littérature et société, Histoire, Satire anglaise, Classes sociales dans la littérature, Conditions sociales, Engels, Satires, Fictie, Armen (personen), Pauvres, Dans la littérature, Thèmes, motifs, Classes sociales, Satire, Geschichte (1700-1800), Roman, Gesellschaftskritik
Places: England
Time periods: 18th century
LC classification: PR858.P66 F73 1997