Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman

Everett Zimmerman

Jan 2007 · University of Delaware Press

About this ebook

This collection of twelve essays by colleagues, students, and friends of Everett Zimmerman treats four topics that Zimmerman explored during his career: the representation of the self in narratives, the early British novel and related forms, their epistemological and generic borders, and their intellectual and cultural contexts. The collection is divided into two sections: Boundaries and Forms. The essays in Boundaries explore how epistemological and narrative distinctions between history and fiction meet or overlap in the novel's relationship to other forms, including providential history, travel narratives, uptopias, autobiography, and visual art. In Forms, the contributors investigate fictional, historical, and material forms; the impact those cultural phenomena had on the meaning and value attributed to literary works; and how such forms arose in response to historical conditions. The essays describe the historical range of Zimmerman's work, beginning with Defoe and ending with Coetzee, and treat such key writers of the long eighteenth century as Fielding, Richardson, Walpole, Austen, and Scott. Bakersfield. Robert Mayer is Professor of English and Director of the Screen Studies Program at Oklahoma State University.

About the author

Robert Mayer was a journalist and author of the 1977 superhero novel Superfolks. He attended the City College of New York and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. While in journalism school he received a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and after graduation he joined the Washington Post before going to work for Newsday, where he spent the next 10 years of his career. After six years at Newssday, Mayer became its New York City columnist, and in 1968 he won the National Headliner Award, given to the best feature columnist in the country. In both 1969 and 1971, he won the Mike Berger Award, given for the year's best writing about New York City, and was the first person to ever win it twice. In the 1970s Mayer moved to Santa Fe, N.Mex., to concentrate on writing books. He wrote 13 novels and three works of nonfiction. Superfolks, his best-known work, is a novel meant for adults that satirizes and deconstructs the superhero genre. Robert Mayer passed away on July 23, 2019 at the age of 80, from complications from Parkinson's Disease.