“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-756
Author(s):  
Christine Hedlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Hearing Voices ◽  
Medical Discourses ◽  
American Cultural History ◽  
Secular Age ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown'sWieland, or The Transformation(1798) as engaging with the distinctive “secular age” of the early republic, a volatile moment in American cultural history when such experiences as having visions and hearing voices, both prevalent in the novel, drew an array of religious and medical explanations. Drawing upon the work of theorists of new secular studies, I argue that the doubts of the novel's narrator Clara regarding who or what is responsible for her family's undoing signal the difficulty of storytelling in an age of spiritual and intellectual uncertainty. By thus reading Clara's indeterminacy as a reaction to the contrapuntal religious and medical discourses of the early republic, my essay offers new insight into the significance of her rhetorically strained, inconclusive attempt at rendering a didactic narrative. Rather than offering Clara merely as a negative example for readers – a victim of her own imperfect discipline, as she herself assesses – Brown utilizes her self-proclaimed failure to ironize the self-assuredness of eighteenth-century didactic novels in an age rife with doubt.

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Book Production ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Insight Into

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the ‘eighteenth-century English novel’ in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the ‘long’ eighteenth century—in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, ‘the novel’ finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook covers not only those ‘masters and mistresses’ of early prose fiction—such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott, and Austen—who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel—such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the reprinting of popular fiction after 1774—offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

‘Carving the Complete Edition’: Self-commentary, Poetry, and Illustration in the Early-Qing Erotic Novel Romance of an Embroidered Screen (1670)

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengjun Li
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Erotic Novel ◽  
Chinese Fiction ◽  
Large Corpus

Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.

Genius in France

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
History Of

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

scholarly journals Isaac Olsens kopibok som kulturuttrykk på tidlig 1700-tall

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 60-84
Author(s):  
Liv Helene Willumsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Northern Norway ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Insight Into

Isaac Olsen's Copy Book as a Cultural Expression of the Early Eighteenth Century.This article deals with a copy book written by Isaac Olsen, dating from the early eighteenth century. Isaac Olsen was a teacher and catechist working among the Sami people in the region of Finnmark, Northern Norway. He was a predecessor of the Sami missionary Thomas von Westen. Isaac Olsen left a handwritten copy book of nearly 1000 pages, today preserved in The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. The copy book is a compilation of documents related to Isaac Olsen’s work and person. Most of the documents are written in his own hand, but the book also contains documents written by governmental officials such as regional governors and provosts, and even the king in Copenhagen. The article focuses on the voices that may be heard in the texts contained in Isaac Olsen’s copy book: the pedagogical voice, the religious voice, the voice of popular culture, the voices of state officials. Attention is also paid to the contemporary practice of writing and the practice of professional copying. Isaac Olsen’s copy book, which dates from the early 1700s, is seen as a valuable historical source that may give insight into the mental horizon of an individual as well as knowledge about the society in which he lived.

“The Grease of God”: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

PMLA ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn New
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Secular Age

Recent criticism of the eighteenth-century English novel points to a providential world view as the “proper conceptual context” for these fictions, but it would be an error to see the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett as uniformly or unhesitatingly committed to the providential order. These authors constructed fictions, characters, and structures in response to the historical actuality of the age, in transition from the Christian to the secular world view. It is this transition and its effect on the providential world view that provide the conceptual context for the fiction of this period. Critics, having recognized the novel as the fictional form of a secular age, must also recognize the significance of the romance as that fictional form best depicting the providential order. In eighteenth-century English fiction the romance is gingerly displaced from the theoretical center of narrative by elements of form now identified with the novel.

“Alas, Poor Yorick!”: Elegiac Friendship in Tristram Shandy

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (5) ◽  
pp. 1450-1456
Author(s):  
George E. Haggerty
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Direct Reflection ◽  
The Way

Not far into the first volume of laurence sterne's tristram shandy, we are presented with the death scene of yorick, the country parson who plays a central role in the novel. Yorick has barely made his appearance before his death is lamented in one of the novel's most arresting passages. This death scene is unexpected and out of sync with the way the story has been told so far. Readers are not yet aware that events transpire according to a system all their own; nor do they realize that in Tristram Shandy death is implicit in the lives of its characters as perhaps in no other novel, certainly no other comic novel, of the last half of the eighteenth century. Of course, in Tristram Shandy there is no law about when things happen or how they relate to matters around them, except some supple notion of memory and the association of ideas, as articulated by John Locke. Still, Sterne, who uses the self-effacing parson to represent himself, has made no bones about his ill health and how short a time he has for writing his novel, and in that sense this scene could be placed anywhere and it would be perfectly intelligible. One critic, at least, reads the novel as a direct reflection of Sterne's awareness of his own mortal illness.

Reviewing the Novel

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Forster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines the place of fiction in eighteenth-century reviewing and the place of reviewing in eighteenth-century fiction. While reviewers might express scorn for many of the novels they reviewed and for their readers, generally assumed to be female, they also paid substantial attention to fiction. Sales of fiction might be substantially unaffected by reviews, but the reviewers’ comments were still seen as influential. Despite all the insults, complaints, and exaggerations, their judgements helped to solidify the position of fiction in the literary world. They also provide for us now a valuable resource for the history of the novel, including insight into the vagaries of literary reputation.

The Reconstrual of Imagination and Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Knox-Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Real World ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Real ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Emma has often convincingly been assigned to the “quixotic” novel, a genre much favored by the long eighteenth century and admired on occasion by Jane Austen herself. But whereas novels of this type invariably end with a joint renunciation of imagination and romance in deference to a greater realism, Emma shows imagination to be integral to an apprehension of the real world, and to require, for its fidelity, a principle long enshrined by romance. Austen’s understanding of imagination as both necessary and all-pervasive—held in common with a number of contemporary philosophers who built on David Hume’s analysis of the “productive” and “magical” faculty that underlay all perception—in no way lessened her sense of its ambivalence, and Emma shows how its work of construction is constantly undermined by received stereotypes as well as by insidious subterfuges of the self. The novel celebrates an empirical habit of mind, fortified by the virtue of benevolence.

Comparative Epistemology of Suspicion: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Human Sciences

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 649-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Strowick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Identification System ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Close Interrelationship

ArgumentIn calling psychoanalysis a “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), Ricoeur marks at once its use in a disposition characteristic of modernity: the disposition of suspicion. Modernity gives rise to various forms of suspicion, to modern forms of ressentiment and practices of disciplining oneself (the suspicion of oneself) as well as to an epistemology of suspicion. In this essay, I shall analyze the epistemological function of suspicion – which as the “paradigm of clues” (Ginzburg 1988) becomes the leading paradigm of the human sciences in the last third of the nineteenth century – and its close interrelationship with the techniques of power. As I shall demonstrate through a comparative reading of psychoanalytical, literary, and criminological texts, the modern production of knowledge in the human sciences cannot be separated from the modern “micro-physics of power,” which for Foucault was established in the eighteenth century, and the technologies of the self. I shall situate the paradigm of clues within the framework of the modern disposition of suspicion in order to combine the epistemological reflections with an analysis of cultural history. Thus I will first examine the paradigm of clues from the perspectives of cultural theory (Foucault and Nietzsche) and semiotics (Peirce), in order to illuminate the structural unreliability of the episteme as well as the way it is closely linked to the techniques of power. In what follows, I will apply this view to Bertillon's photographic identification system, the psychoanalytical concept of the trace, and Kafka's short story The Burrow.

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