Description: Oliver Goldsmith has a claim to be the only eighteenth-century author who wrote canonical works in prose fiction, poetry, and drama. An Irish writer working at the centre of the British and Irish Enlightenments, with all the rich complications of identity this entailed, he authored The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer, works that number among the greatest literary productions of the century. He was also a major historian, biographer, journalist, and translator operating at the heart of literary London. Through four sections covering Goldsmith's Life and Career; Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Contexts; Literary Contexts; and Critical Fortunes and Afterlives, this volume engages with a wide range of illuminating topics that will allow both new and experienced readers of Goldsmith to understand more deeply the impact he had on his times and the powerful influence he exerted on subsequent literary culture.
Brief description: Michael Griffin is Professor of English at the University of Limerick. He is General Editor, with David O'Shaughnessy, of The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (2024- ) and co-editor, also with O'Shaughnessy, of The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (2018), both for Cambridge University Press. He is the author of Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith (2013) and editor of The Selected Writings of Thomas Dermody (2012) and The Collected Poems of Laurence Whyte (2016).
Review Quotes: 'Oliver Goldsmith, the author of literary masterpieces in three genres (fiction, poetry, and drama), has never received the comprehensive treatment of other 18th-century British writers, whose careers have long been mapped. This volume fully remedies that inequity with a well-designed presentation of Goldsmith's works in the literary, social, intellectual, and cultural contexts of his time.... Highly recommended.' E. Kraft, CHOICE