Overview

This first modern scholarly edition of the letters of Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) sets the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer in a rich context, showing how Goldsmith's Irish identity was marked and complicated by cosmopolitan ambition. He was at the very heart of Grub Street culture and the Georgian theatre, and was a founding member of Dr Johnson's Literary Club; his circle included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, George Colman and Hester Piozzi. Containing a detailed introduction and extensive notes, this edition is essential to those wishing to know more about Goldsmith the man and the writer, and provides a rich and suggestive nexus for understanding the cultural cross-currents of the literary Enlightenment in eighteenth-century London.

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9781107474543

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Reviews

'The editors, Michael Griffin and David O'Shaughnessy, have undertaken considerable original research in updating and adding to Katherine Balderston's 1928 Cambridge University Press collection of Goldsmith Letters. Like Balderston before them, Griffin and O'Shaughnessy confront a slender body of surviving letters but build a fascinating story from what remains.' Claire Connolly, The Irish Times 'It has seldom seemed necessary to consider his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith's letters, Michael Griffin and David O'Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right.' Norma Clarke, London Review of Books 'In their valuable introduction, Michael Griffin and David O'Shaughnessy discuss the unexplained threads that run through the letters, the self-confessed flaws of character, the homesickness for Ireland, the bitter tone, the obsequious requests for money … Reading the letters should send us straight back to the works to be surprised by Goldsmith's clarity, relevance and entirely individual sense of the absurd.' Kate Chisholm, The Times Literary Supplement 'Indispensable … this excellent and long-overdue new edition of his letters brings Goldsmith and the people and forces shaping his work into considerably sharper focus.' Maureen Harkin, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 'Superb … Griffin and O'Shaugnessy are a formidable team and their work, given the complexity of Goldmsith studies, amounts to a significant breakthrough for Goldsmith scholarship.' Fergus O'Ferrell, Dublin Review of Books

Author Information

Michael Griffin is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Limerick. He is the author of Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith (2013). He has also edited The Selected Writings of Thomas Dermody (2012), and The Collected Works of Laurence Whyte (2016). David O'Shaughnessy is an associate professor in English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of William Godwin and the Theatre (2010), editor of The Plays of William Godwin (2010) and co-editor of the online edition of Godwin's diary. He has also edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (2015) on the London Irish of the eighteenth century.

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