Professor John Skinner analyzes the prose narratives of Tobias George Smollett (1721-71) and their place in the development of the novel in Constructions of Smollett: A Study in Genre and Gender.

Tobias Smollett After 300 Years offers a collection of essays on one of the great literary figures of the eighteenth century: the Scottish writer, Tobias Smollett (1721–1771). Drawing together the work of an international group of scholars, with a variety of critical approaches, the book examines aspects of Smollett’s life, writing and reputation on the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) was a man of letters in the fullest sense. He was not only a novelist but also a playwright, poet, journalist, historian, travel writer, critic, translator, and editor. Trained as a physician, he saw the world with acutely sensitive eyes, believing that what was externally visible signified and gave definition to what could be known about the private, interior life. His fiction is therefore distinguished by its intensely visual qualities. Tobias Smollett: Novelist goes beyond all previous critical studies in its attention to these qualities in Smollett's novels, reading them as exercises of a visual imagination. Along with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, Smollett was one of the major British novelists of his generation. Like his kindred spirit William Hogarth, he was both chronicler and interpreter of what he saw. His episodically structured narratives reflect his vision of a harsh and unpredictable world, while his unforgettable characters display his deep understanding of the individual as moral agent. Jerry C. Beasley's book is both focused and broad in its range, crossing disciplines and genres as it seeks to demonstrate intersections between the graphic and verbal arts, always with an eye to how Smollett crafted his stories. Seventeen illustrations, many of them from works by Hogarth, complement the argument. This book honors Smollett as an author who wrote in an unorthodox but compelling way and makes the complexities of his narratives more accessible than they have ever been before.

Over the past decade, literary scholars have become increasingly engaged with colonial studies and have fashioned various points of focus in their investigations of imperialist narratives, including the figure of woman, cannibalism, the romance of the first encounter, and the tropicopolitan. This book builds on existing work by offering a new focal point: the evolution of the British imperial hero in America from Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of... Guiana (1596) to James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764), with concentration on narratives produced between the year of Cromwell's Western Design (1655) and the British raid on Cartegena (1741). Each individual chapter isolates a distinct type of colonial hero, furnishing examples from a wide variety of narratives, including some nonfiction essays and tracts, but chiefly novels, plays, and poems.

Offering a fresh perspective on a misunderstood eighteenth-century novelist, this study situates Tobias Smollett (1721-71) as the chief witness to the birth of the modern commercial art market. By examining the critical remarks and characters in Smollett's journalism and histories, the novels Peregrine Pickle and Humphry Clinker, and Travels Through France and Italy, the novelist is portrayed as fully involved with the commercial art market even while he offered perceptive criticism of it. Smollett's complete reviews of fine art from The Critical Review are published for the first time in an annotated appendix, while his involvement with the lavish illustration of his massive Complete History of England is analyzed in a second appendix. The approach to fine art that emerges from his writing modifies our understanding of the public art market of today, making this study of interest not only to Smollett scholars and students of eighteenth-century fiction but also to those interested in the history of art and aesthetic appreciation. William L. Gibson is an independent scholar.

Takes a look at issues raised not only in Smollett's novels, for which he is usually remembered, but also in other works of this prolific Scottish author.