scholarly journals SHALL WE TAKE THE LINGUISTIC TURN? BRITISH RADICALISM IN THE ERA OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 583-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Radical Culture ◽  
Harvester Wheatsheaf ◽  
Popular Contention ◽  
The French Revolution

Intertextual war: Edmund Burke and the French Revolution in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and James Mackintosh. By Steven Blakemore. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-8386-3751-5. £32.Radical expression: political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790–1850. By James Epstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. xi+233. ISBN 0-19-506550-6. £30.Tom Paine: a political life. By John Keane. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Pp. xxii+644. ISBN 0-7475-2543-9. £8.99.Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain. By H. L. Malchow. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+335. ISBN 0-8047-2664-7. £35 (hb). ISBN 0-8047-2793-7. £12.95 (pb).Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. By Charles Tilly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+476. ISBN 0-674-68980-1. £31.50.Radical culture: discourse, resistance and surveillance, 1790–1820. By David Worrall. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Pp. ix+236. ISBN 0-7450-0960-3. £40.Most of these books are influenced by current philosophical or methodological concerns which might be labelled, according to taste, as poststructuralism, postmodernism, or the linguistic turn; but they are influenced to very varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum stands Tilly's substantial study, essentially modernist, rejecting the latest fashions. At the other stand the books by Blakemore and Malchow, their colours firmly nailed to the mast of deconstruction. Blakemore teaches in a department of English, and although Malchow's institutional affiliation is as an historian, his book is a hermeneutic of literary texts. The great majority of ‘postmodern’ analyses of texts from this period have come from the stable of literary studies, perhaps especially from scholars concerned, as Malchow is, with the construction of gender, that great growth area of the present time. None of these books subscribes in practice to a postmodern relativism, declaring itself to be merely a construction or representation of the past: all arrive at some kind of closure, explicitly or implicitly asserting the truth of their interpretations. Historians concerned to justify their subject to funding bodies may judge this to be prudent; nevertheless a greater degree of reflexivity, of self-doubt, would have been welcome in some instances, as we shall see.

Gothic Revival/Gothick

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie A. Glaser
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The French Revolution

Gothic Revival designates a key moment in architectural history. It also refers to the use of Gothic forms and motifs in furniture, design, and the decorative arts. It is inextricably connected to the reawakened interest in medieval architecture that began in the 18th century and that provided both its scholarly basis and intellectual context. Thus, Gothic Revival comprises neo-Gothic artifacts as well as the antiquarian, scholarly, and literary texts that fueled it. Scholars distinguish between Gothic Revival and Survival. “Survival” refers to the continued use of the Gothic style in post-medieval building, whereas “Revival” describes the reuse of Gothic details. As an aesthetic term, in 16th-century Italy “Gothic” was associated with the “barbaric” medieval style and by the 18th-century it was equated with bad taste. “Gothick” was used for 18th-century garden architecture, design, and buildings, such as Walpole’s villa at Strawberry Hill or the Gothic House at Wörlitz, both playful amalgamations of Gothic motifs. Lenoir followed a similar aesthetic when he created monuments from the rubble of the French Revolution. With the rise of antiquarian studies and a growing number of architects schooled in the Gothic style, the Revival grew in impetus and importance through the 19th century. Frivolous Gothick gave way to an archeologically informed style that characterized the work of Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc. Neo-Gothic was adopted by Catholics and Protestants alike and promoted by local and national governments. Monumental restoration and completion of edifices such as Notre-Dame de Paris and Cologne Cathedral also played an important role. Significantly, Gothic Revival reflected each nation’s understanding of its history: in England it was nostalgic, looking back to a lost golden age; in France, Gothic forged a continuity with a past irreparably severed by the French Revolution; in the German-speaking lands Gothic was considered to symbolize the lost unity of the medieval German Empire, which meant that the German Revival was forward looking toward future political and religious unity. Creativity and eclecticism characterized the later Gothic Revival, with Romanesque, Byzantine, and Rundbogen styles becoming viable alternatives to Gothic. Scholarship on Gothic Revival dates to the late 19th century, when Eastlake set the pattern for the scholarly discourse. In the early 20th century, Clark and Abraham negatively appraised the Revival, a stance that English architectural historians began to revise in the 1940s. By the 1970s, England, France, and Germany were considered the center of Gothic Revival. In the 1990s Gothic Revival was recognized to be a pan-European phenomenon, and in the 21st century scholars have assiduously explored Gothic’s worldwide spread. This article reflects these scholarly developments.

The Politics of Popularity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Lilti
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter will explain how celebrity, which appeared in the eighteenth century as a new characteristic of cultural life became, during the French Revolution, a key mechanism of political life as well. It will start by outlining the specific features of celebrity, which is based on the curiosity of contemporaries about individuals and on sentimental empathy, and is distinguished from traditional forms of renown such as glory and reputation. It will then discuss how traditional forms of power were transformed, at the end of the eighteenth century, both by the new figure of the “public” and by changing means of communication (especially the periodical press and engraved portraits). Finally, the article will examine the highly ambivalent relationship that the French Revolutionaries negotiated with the new demand for “popularity”—that is, the affective attachment to an actor that introduces the mechanisms of celebrity into the heart of political action.

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

Physiokratische Fiktionen

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-88
Author(s):  
Christopher Meid
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The French Revolution

AbstractThe article presents and discusses the reception of physiocratic thoughts in German literary texts of the Enlightenment. It shows how intensively authors such as Tscharner, Wieland and Klinger adapted physiocratic teachings and popularised them. It demonstrates how the perception of physiocratic argument changed during the years, especially in the context of the French Revolution.

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