Vicar of Wakefield

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ISBN: 9780199537549
Author : Goldsmith, Oliver
Published: 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of pages: 256
Language: English
Format: Paperback

Description

Goldsmith’s famous novel, which includes the song ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly’, remains one of the most highly regarded and beloved works of eighteenth-century fiction, enjoyed by general readers as well as students of literature.
The new introduction by Robert L. Mack examines the reasons for its popularity, and the critical debates over an apparently straightforward novel of sentiment that has also been read as a satire on the social and economic inequalities of the period, and the very literary conventions and morality it seems to embody.
New, up-to-date bibliography and expanded notes.
Reprints Arthur Friedman’s authoritative Oxford English Novels text of the corrected first edition of 1766.

New to this edition

New introduction by Robert L. Mack.
New bibliography.
Expanded notes.

‘He loved all mankind; for fortune prevented him from knowing there were rascals.’Oliver Goldsmith’s hugely successful novel of 1766 remained for generations one of the most highly regarded and beloved works of eighteenth-century fiction. It depicts the fall and rise of the Primrose family, presided over by the benevolent vicar, the narrator of a fairy-tale plot of impersonation and deception, the abduction of a beautiful heroine and the machinations of an aristocratic villain. By turns comic and sentimental, the novel’s popularity owes much to its recognizable depiction of domestic life and loving family relationships. Regarded by some as a straightforward and well-intentioned novel of sentiment, and by others as a satire on the very literary conventions and morality it seems to embody, The Vicar of Wakefield contains, in the figure of the vicar himself, one of the most harmlessly simply and unsophisticated yet also ironically complex narrators ever to appear in English fiction.

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