The Citizen of the World

by Oliver Goldsmith

Overview

The Citizen of the World is a highly readable yet deceptively sophisticated text, using the popular eighteenth-century device of the imaginary observer. Its main narrator, the Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi, draws on traditional ideas of Confucian wisdom as he tries (and sometimes fails) to come to terms with the commercial modernity and spectacle of imperial London. Goldsmith explores a moment of economic and social transformation in Britain and at the same time engages with the ramifications of a global conflict, the Seven Years' War (1756–63). He also uses his travelling Chinese narrator as a way of indirectly addressing his own predicament as an Irish exile in London. This edition provides a reliable, authoritative text, records the history of its production, and includes an introduction and explanatory notes which situate this enormously rich work within the political debates and cultural conflicts of its time, illuminating its allusiveness and intellectual ambition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781410204271
Publisher:	University Press of the Pacific
Publication date:	12/31/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	903,621
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

James Watt is Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. He is the author of British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Table of Contents

Introduction; The Citizen of the World; Textual introduction; Bibliographic descriptions, emendations, and collations; Hyphenated line-endings; Bibliography; Index.