Tobias Smollett summary

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Smollett, detail of an oil painting by an unknown artist, about 1770; in the National Portrait Gallery, London

Tobias Smollett, (baptized March 19, 1721, Cardross, Dumbartonshire, Scot.—died Sept. 17, 1771, near Livorno, Tuscany), Scottish satirical novelist. Throughout his life Smollett combined the roles of medical man and writer. He is best known for his novels, including the picaresque novels Roderick Random (1748), a graphic account of British naval life, and Peregrine Pickle (1751), a comic, savage portrayal of 18th-century society. In an active publishing career, he translated, wrote a Complete History of England (1757–58), edited periodicals, including The Critical Review, and compiled a 58-volume Universal History. In the mid-1760s, seriously ill with tuberculosis, he retired to France. In 1766 he published the irascible Travels Through France and Italy, his one nonfiction work that is still read. His finest work, Humphry Clinker (1771), is a humorous epistolary novel.

essay Summary

Essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Some early treatises—such as those of Cicero on the

picaresque novel Summary

Picaresque novel, early form of novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish pícaro) as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive. In its episodic structure the picaresque novel

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satire Summary

Satire, artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform. Satire is a

poetry Summary

Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. (Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.) Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and