Transforming Rebellion into Affirmation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ringel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Young Consumers ◽  
Conservative Values ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth cultures grounded in commercial youth literature became national and international phenomena during the late eighteenth century. For generations, these cultures were at the forefront of efforts to legitimize young people’s emergence as consumers, as readers’ desire for entertainment and representations of youthful independence in their stories compelled producers to mitigate their instructional impulses. Yet as other industries like fashion, television, and music increasingly eschewed obligations to instruct young consumers, youth literature has retained its conservative values. Most of its successful narrative models follow a period of adolescent rebellion with a conclusion that affirms the value of existing institutions, values, and hierarchies. This pattern has caused books and magazines to recede from the vanguard of shaping youth cultures.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

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