Romantic Essayism

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-252
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes

This chapter argues that the Romantic familiar essay privatizes and idealizes the essay’s inherent epistemological ambiguity. While for Addison, Hume, and Johnson, the essayist moderates communication at the borderline of systematic science and the public sphere, for Hazlitt and his contemporary Charles Lamb, the ‘public’ could no longer function as the ground for epistemic solidarity. Once the social intellect of the Scottish Enlightenment was moved into the private domain of consciousness and individual imagination, the essayist was increasingly seen as mediating between idealized phenomenological realms of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience. Consequently, the ludic indeterminacy of the Romantic imagination is oriented by a purely aesthetic purposiveness: its playfulness expresses not the pragmatic presuppositions of communication, but the dark foundations of experience. In aestheticizing the communicative intellect of the eighteenth-century essayists, the identity doublings and performances of the Romantic familiar essay acquire significance as the hypostatized others of a lost wholeness.

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
Beatrijs Vanacker

While authorship recognition was a challenge for all eighteenth-century aspiring writers regardless of their gender, the social position of women was such that public claims of authorship and ownership over a text were even less self-evident in the public sphere. As will be illustrated in this article, female writers especially made extensive use of transfer strategies (such as translation and pseudotranslation) to establish their authorship, thereby turning paratext and narrative into a dynamic maneuvering space. Considered from a gender perspective, the challenge for eighteenth-century female writers was to gradually “invent” themselves, or rather establish a voice of their own. Taking on a different (cultural) persona—even if only on a paratextual level—could provide them with a discursive “platform” from which they could negotiate their way into the literary field. In order to illustrate this gender-specific emancipatory quality of pseudotranslation, as established mainly in their paratexts, the present article proposes a comparative analysis of their forms and functions in the career and oeuvre of three eighteenth-century French women writers, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Mme Beccari and Cornélie de Wouters, who all made extensive use of pseudo-English fiction.


Author(s):  
Angela Dranishnikova ◽  
Ivan Semenov

The national legal system is determined by traditional elements characterizing the culture and customs that exist in the social environment in the form of moral standards and the law. However, the attitude of the population to the letter of the law, as a rule, initially contains negative properties in order to preserve personal freedom, status, position. Therefore, to solve pressing problems of rooting in the minds of society of the elementary foundations of the initial order, and then the rule of law in the public sphere, proverbs and sayings were developed that in essence contained legal educational criteria.


2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.


2019 ◽  
pp. 146-172
Author(s):  
Paul Mutsaers

This concluding chapter synergizes the previous chapters and adds something new. Both functions are captured by the title, Reclaiming the Public in Policing. First, it argues that the empirical and conceptual work in this book points at the corrosion of the public character of policing, which results in law enforcement agencies that find it increasingly difficult to exclude politics, particularism, and populism from their operations. This part of the chapter concludes that it is imperative that we ‘unthink’ bureaucracy as the social evil of our time and revalue the public contours of policing. A second way to reclaim the ‘public’ in policing, now defined not as a quality of the police but an engaged citizenry that is involved in public debates on the police, concerns the role of police scholars in the public sphere. The chapter advocates a public anthropology of police and reflects on the author's efforts to ‘go public’.


Hypatia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 422-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Epstein

Jürgen Habermas's recent challenge to secular citizens calling for greater inclusivity of religious justifications in the public sphere opens new epistemological debates that could benefit from the rich insights of feminist epistemologists. Despite certain theoretical tensions, there is some common ground between Habermas and recent work in feminist epistemology. Specifically, this article explores the shared interests between Habermas and one feminist theorist in particular, Miranda Fricker. I choose Fricker because her formulation of the epistemological and ethical hybrid virtues of testimonial justice and hermeneutical justice provide efficacious theoretical and practical tools capable of deepening the epistemological basis of Habermas's challenge to secular citizens. After a detailed analysis of Habermas's and Fricker's respective epistemological positions, I argue that Fricker's analysis provides a rich framework for thinking through questions of power, identity, and credibility with respect to religious justifications in the public sphere. In conclusion, this article emphasizes the importance of fostering more robust and just epistemic communities capable of countering the social, political, and ethical injustices of epistemic disauthorization and marginalization.


2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.


2004 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Gregory ◽  
Brett Hutchins

This paper investigates the social construction of a site of public discourse: the letters to the editor page of an Australian regional daily newspaper, The Daily News.1 Of key concern are the processes through which public discourse is constructed and mediated by those who select and edit letters for publication. Drawing on a content analysis of the letters page and in-depth interviews with the editorial staff, it is demonstrated how routine practices and the social knowledge of media workers play a specific and discernible role in shaping public dialogue. In light of the findings presented, the concluding section discusses the relationship between editorial practices and the public sphere.


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