Picturesque

Picture World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 284-347
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Camera Obscura ◽  
Niagara Falls ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Visual Technology ◽  
Art And Technology ◽  
Imperial Power

Most middle-class Victorian parlors would have contained a stereoscope with which to view a collection of stereographic cards. When viewers peeped into the device, the stereoview’s dual photographs leapt into startling three-dimensionality, making the stereoscope the perfect vehicle for virtual travel—to everywhere from Egypt to Niagara Falls. While some have seen the stereoscope as a forebear of postmodernism, Chapter 5 instead aligns it with the picturesque, the high-art landscape aesthetic of the eighteenth century. The chapter reveals the surprising imbrication of nature, art, and technology: the picturesque was enabled by technological devices that ranged from the Claude glass to the camera obscura to the stereoscope. The stereoscope’s visual technology worked to remediate Romantic ideals: it was an organic machine and prosthesis attached to the spectator’s body that enabled an extraordinary, humanistic experience. Promoting corporeal fantasies across space and time, stereoscopy reflected an imperial power dynamics of global visual mastery.

DELIGHTFUL COXCOMBS TO INDUSTRIOUS MEN: FASHIONABLE POLITICS IN CECIL AND PENDENNIS

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class A ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Trade Office

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

scholarly journals Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110347
Author(s):  
Imane Kostet
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

Prologue

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Western World ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Secular Terms

This prologue provides an overview of the Secular Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference. In the Western world, art, music, science, politics, and even the categories of space and time had undergone a gradual process of secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Enlightenment built on this process and made it into an international intellectual cause. This book then aims to understand the major intellectual currents of the century that gave birth to the label “secular.”

Berlin and Vienna

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-203
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Personal Transformations ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
New Institutions

This epilogue argues that the meaning of the Enlightenment resides in political structures and personal transformations that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. These are most visible in the lives and ideas found in its last quarter. Since the late 1680s into the 1790s, all sorts of people tried to break with tradition and find alternatives to absolutism in church and state. By 1800, space and time on earth were filled by fewer miracles, saints, and prophecies than had been the case in 1700. Ultimately, the eighteenth-century philosophes, despite their disagreements, shared a universal distrust of organized religion and the priests who enforced it. Indeed, the century ended with revolutions that focused minds on making new institutions, new laws, new hopes and dreams.

The Taming of Highland Masculinity: Interpersonal Violence and Shifting Codes of Manhood, c. 1760–1840

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Abrams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Indigenous Culture ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
The Law ◽  
Violent Assault

This chapter argues that male interpersonal violence provides a way in which divergent, conflicting and shifting codes of manliness in Scottish society can be discerned. Historians of masculinity have argued that the eighteenth century saw a change in the model of manhood as male interpersonal violence in defence of honour and reputation was replaced by the advocacy of self-governance and recourse to the law. Using court records of violent assault, this chapter focusses on a type of modernizing society – the Scottish Highlands 1760-1840 - in which a code of violence governed by an indigenous culture of manhood was gradually superceded by new cultural norms. An earlier association of masculinity with interpersonal violence in the Highlands was challenged increasingly from around 1800 by those who advocated civility and restraint amongst men, especially in the growing Highland town of Inverness, the centre of an emerging middle-class culture with changing social sensibilities

Respectable Mistresses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole von Germeten
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Sexually Active ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins with a quote from the celebrated seventeenth-century Mexico City Poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, highlighting the hypocritical intersection between gender and sexuality in this era. The focus here is on the legal history of eighteenth-century middle class women who retained a degree of public honor as they took part in sex work inside their homes.The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction.

Art, Nature, Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Steven D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Imperial Power

This final chapter demonstrates the importance of contextualizing epigrams into the sociohistorical circumstances of their era if we want to achieve a deeper comprehension of the transformations that various motifs undergo through space and time. The chapter analyses a cluster of epigrams on imperial gardens that date from the first to the seventh century CE, and shows how these poems reflect diverse views about imperial power, aesthetics, pagan culture, and Christianity. The chapter discusses first an epigram from the Neronian era, then moves forward to late antiquity to consider a sequence of garden epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian (sixth century CE). The chapter concludes with an explicitly Christian garden epigram from the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (seventh century CE).

scholarly journals THE ROMANTIC SOCIALIST ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIANISM

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 737-768
Author(s):  
NAOMI J. ANDREWS
Keyword(s):  
Power Dynamics ◽  
French Society ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Liberal Individualism

“Humanitarian” (humanitaire) came into use in French contemporaneously with the emergence of romantic socialism, and in the context of the rebuilding of post-revolutionary French society and its overseas empire beginning in the 1830s. This article excavates this early idea of humanitarianism, documenting an alternative genealogy for the term and its significance that has been overlooked by scholars of both socialism and humanitarianism. This humanitarianism identified a collective humanity as the source of its own salvation, rather than an external, well-meaning benefactor. Unlike liberal models of advocacy, which invoked individualized actors and recipients of their care, socialists privileged solidarity within their community and rejected the foundational logic of liberal individualism. In tracing this history, this article considers its importance for contemporary debates about humanitarianism’s imperial power dynamics.

The rise of a catholic middle class in eighteenth-century Ireland

1958 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 91-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Wall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
Travel Books

Historians of eighteenth-century Ireland agree in stating that catholics succeeded in amassing considerable wealth in trade, in spite of, or even because of, the popery laws, but little effort has been made to examine this question in detail.What percentage of the principal merchants and traders of Ireland belonged to the catholic faith, or what percentage of the trade of Ireland was in their hands during the century? It is doubtful whether these questions will ever be answered completely. Contemporary travel books, and even contemporary local histories such as those of Charles Smith, scarcely mention trade, and contribute not at all to solving our particular problem. Local histories of more modern date concentrate on political rather than on economic history; and although it is to be hoped that local historians and genealogists will fill in some of the gaps, from family papers, from local newspapers and other available sources, the general historian investigating the problem has at present no regional or local studies to assist him in his researches. He must therefore try to piece together such scraps of information as are available and endeavour to arrive at some general conclusions.

The Catholic London District in the Eighteenth Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-268
Author(s):  
David Butler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Drury Lane

The London of Challoner consisted only of some seven square miles, one square mile of which was, of course, the City of London. It can all be put onto some eight pages of the present A–Z map of London, which at the time of writing consists of 141 pages. John Rocques's map of London, on a scale of 200 feet to the inch, which he began in 1738 and finished in 1747, in its London Topographical Society format of 1982, perfectly illustrates the London of both Challoner and Defoe. The western extremities were at Marylebone, Knightsbridge and Chelsea, the eastern at Stepney, Limehouse and Deptford, the northern at Tottenham Court and Bethnal Green, while the southern limits were at Kennington and Walworth Common. The population of London was assessed by Wrigley in 1990 as c. 575,000 in 1700, as c. 675,000 in 1750 and as c. 959,000 in 1801. The 1767 papist returns indicated that most London Catholics lived in the parishes of St James and St Giles, within Westminster. Schwarz has pointed out the considerable social segregation in London, middle-class areas being in the west and central parts, with the poorer areas in the south and east. The St Giles area around Seven Dials going east to Bow Street and Drury Lane is reputed to have contained a third of the capital's beggars and to have been a notoriously criminal quarter. The Catholic numbers in Westminster were 7,724, the City numbers 1,492, with the Middlesex out-parishes having more than 2,000. The 1767 total for London, including the parishes to the south and east, comes to 12,320, clearly too low, as is the accumulated total for the London District of around 15,800. This gives about 3,500 for the London District outside the capital while Challoner's own figures give us a Catholic population of 5,261. If the errors in enumeration were the same in both areas (a large assumption), this enables us to guess that the 1767 figures could be corrected to about 18,500 London Catholics and about 24,000 for the whole District.

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