Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Shauna Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social System ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Conflicting Goals

This essay on the novel of ideas in the 1790s investigates the sometimes conflicting goals pursue by the ‘Jacobin’ novelists—figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays—and also charts their characteristic preoccupations with the proper relations between reason and passion and mind and body. Revamping the Enlightenment tradition of the conte philosophique, these supporters of the Revolution in France and political reform in Britain advocated a newly ambitious species of novel capable of building bridges between the discursive domains of fiction and political theory. These novelists also set out to claim the power over readers’ emotions they found in sentimental fiction’s stories of suffering individuals. At the same time, contrariwise, they aimed to assemble comprehensive accounts of the social system—of ‘things as they are’, in Godwin’s phrase—and touted their commitment to the promulgation of universal, impersonal truth.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ◽  
Story Writing

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceived of the central idea for Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus—most often referred to simply as Frankenstein—during the summer of 1816 while vacationing on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is her first and most famous novel. Although the assertion is debatable, some scholars have argued that Frankenstein is the first work of modern science fiction. Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein in response to a “ghost story” writing contest between herself, Percy Shelley, Percy Shelley’s physician and friend John Polidori, and Lord Byron, who were trapped indoors reading German ghost stories as the result of inclement weather. Polidori’s contribution to this contest, “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819), influenced the development of Gothic literature. According to Shelley, she drew inspiration from a nightmare she had, which she attributed to discussions she overheard between Percy and Byron regarding experiments with electricity and animation. Shelley began working on the novel when she returned home to England in September, and the book’s first edition was published anonymously in 1818. Shelley’s father William Godwin made minor revisions for a second edition in 1821; and Shelley herself made more substantial changes for the third edition in 1831. The story is told through an epistolary frame, and follows Victor Frankenstein, a university student of the “unhallowed arts” who assembles, animates, and abandons an unnamed human-like creature. The creature goes on to haunt his creator both literally and metaphorically. Over the past two hundred years, the story has been widely influential, and re-interpreted in various forms of culture and media. In literary studies, scholars have discussed which edition of the text is the “truest” to Mary Shelley’s intended vision. The novel has been analyzed for its messages about human pride and hubris, the pursuit of knowledge, the nature/nurture question, as put forth by Rousseau, ethical questions in medicine and science, and family, gender, and reproduction, among other topics.

Feminism and the Position of Women

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
Intellectual Advancement

Feminism in its modern meanings attests to a movement for change in the social, economic and legal position of women. In the Romantic period, no such movement existed. There were, however, individual women whose voices, separately and together, suggest the existence of a commonality of feeling around the intellectual advancement of the female sex. This article examines writing by women on female education and sexual and social reform, focussing on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Lamb. It connects political writing and educational treatises to the novels and essays written by these women and it reflects on the shared concerns from which modern feminism emerged.

scholarly journals Shaping Gender: Femininity and Masculinity Through Sartorial Fashion in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
Alberto García García-Madrid
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Post War ◽  
Literary Techniques

Abstract Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway — published in 1925 — not only represents a major work regarding its literary techniques during the years of British Modernism, but also constitutes a critique of the social system of the post-war years, which was experiencing a change regarding the strict Victorian stereotypes of gender. Social status linked to sartorial fashion is a recurring element in the novel when considering these configurations. Woolf vindicates through different characters’ reflections a rearrangement of femininity and masculinity.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.

THE BREAKDOWN OF SOCIAL SYSTEM AND THEIR REFLECTION ON POST-2003 NARRATIVES

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 264-275
Author(s):  
Hutham Badr HUSSEIN
Keyword(s):  
Social System ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Complex Form ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
The Social

(Parsons) defines the social system, of several definitions, and perhaps the clearest one is the one in which he believes that the social system is composed of two or more actors (individuals), each of whom occupies a distinct social position or and plays a distinct role, as it is an organized pattern that governs relations between individuals Or a network of interactive relationships that organizes their rights and duties towards each other, as it is a framework of common standards or values, as well as it includes different types of symbols and different cultural issues. While the novel is a very complex structure, and it is difficult to imagine that it was born with an individual invention and without a basis in the social life of the group, it is not possible to imagine that this complex form has no similarity or dialectical relationship between it and the social life of the heroes, this literary form depicts the daily relationship of people. And their different relationships with the society in which they live, the novel as seen by (René Girard) is what reveals the truth about man and reveals the inauthenticity of the human being. And if we know that some see that the literary creator is no less important than the social world, but that he surpasses him in many stages due to his delicate sensitivity and his ability to capture the parts of social life, the anatomy of individuals’ psyche, and to track the stages of social change and their implications for values and behavior And the directives, to what extent was the social system in Iraq able to maintain its social patterns, and what led to the collapse of that coherent system of social systems? And how was the Iraqi novel able to reverse this collapse in all its details? All this we will review in this research, which will be taken from novels published after 2003, material for it, and these narrations are: 1. The novel: Death in the Cherry Field.by the novelist Azhar Gerges. 2. The novel: The Killers, by the novelist Dia al-Khalidi. 3. The novel: the name on the soles, of the novelist Dia Jebili

The Satire of Walker's Vagabond on Rousseau and Godwin

PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh H. MacMullan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
View Point ◽  
Large Section ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought

George Walker, a London bookseller and publisher, author of several Gothic tales, printed in 1799 a satirical novel, The Vagabond, directed against the Jacobins and their philosophic forerunners. The author's purpose was a serious one, to refute and counteract the works that had poured from the Jacobin presses. As a result the novel, though amusing and fanciful in the manner of the Anti-Jacobin, represents a consistent view-point and an earnest desire to show the beauties of society as then organized. In its way, it is a summary of the reactionary position, and, by giving the opinions of the opponents of Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Holcroft, Paine, William Godwin, and others, illustrates a large section of late eighteenth-century thought.

Mary Hays, Disciple of William Godwin

PMLA ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 472-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ray Adams
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Biographical Sketch ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The French Revolution

Mary hays was one of that remarkable coterie of women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Alderson, Mrs. Reveley, Mrs. Fenwick, and Mrs. Inchbald, who afforded William Godwin a sort of philosophic seraglio. Little is known of her life: no biographical sketch of her exists. As the information left by others is sparse, we must depend much upon her supposedly autobiographical novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. She lived to be eighty-three, but the last forty years of her life are without a record. Soon after the decade of the French Revolution she became enveloped in an obscurity which has never lifted. Once the immediate revolutionary impulse had spent itself, she seems to have written nothing more. But in the revival of the fame of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to both of whom she was as faithful as their shadows, she perhaps deserves more attention than she has received. In her blind discipleship she innocently reduced many of Godwin's philosophical maxims to absurdities. She thus made herself the laughing-stock of those conservatives whose sympathies were narrowed by mere respectability as well as of certain liberals whose convictions did not give them such reckless courage.

Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Zwerdling
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social System ◽  
Self Control ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
English Society ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Natural Expression ◽  
First World

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted, as she says, “to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Her critical attention is focused not on individuals but on the values of a particular class at a particular historical moment. Her novel examines the governing class’s control over English society in the period immediately following the First World War, showing how coercive the ideal of stoical fortitude nurtured during the War had become by the time it was over. The dominant faith in the value of self-control creates an atmosphere of emotional austerity that in one way or another affects the behavior of all the characters in the novel. It inhibits the natural expression of feeling in those who live by the governing-class code and turns the more rebellious members of the society into unstable emotional exhibitionists.

scholarly journals LOKALITAS SASAK DALAM NOVEL GURU DANE DAN GURU ONYEH KARYA SALMAN FARIS

Diksi ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lalu Nasrulloh
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social System ◽  
Belief System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dominant Effect ◽  
Data Presentation ◽  
Technology System ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan (1) wujud lokalitas Sasak dalam novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh karya Salman Faris, dan (2) fungsi lokalitas Sasak dalam membangun cerita secara keseluruhan pada novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh karya Salman Faris. Jenis penelitian ini adalah kualitatif. Subjek penelitian ini novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh karya Salman Faris dan teori yang digunakan adalah  teori sosiologi sastra. Keabsahan data diperoleh dengan uji triangulasi teori. Data dianalisis dengan teknik deskriptif kualitatif, yakni mendeskripsikan, kategorisasi, inferensi, dan penyajian data. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan hal-hal sebagai berikut. Pertama, wujud lokalitas Sasak dalam novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh tercermin pada beberapa unsur, yaitu: (1) lokasi atau tempat, (2) sistem kemasyarakatan suku Sasak, (3) sistem kepercayaan (agama) dan mitos, (4) kesenian Sasak, (5) penggunaan bahasa Sasak, (6) sistem mata pencaharian hidup masyarakat suku Sasak, dan (7) sistem teknologi dan peralatan masyarakat suku Sasak. Kedua, fungsi lokalitas Sasak dalam membangun cerita secara keseluruhan, yang paling dominan mempengaruhi adalah latar tempat, penggunaan bahasa Sasak (diksi), serta yang terakhir adalah nama-nama tokoh yang mencerminkan ciri khas orang Sasak, seperti Amaq Tembiengbieng, Jero Mihram, Temelak Mangan, dan Guru Dane.Kata Kunci: lokalitas, Sasak, sosiologi sastra SASAK LOCALITY IN NOVEL GURU DANE AND GURU ONYEH BY SALMAN FARIS ABSTRACT     This study was aimed to describe (1) the form of Sasak locality in novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh by Salman Faris, and (2) the function of Sasak locality in the process of building context of the whole story in the novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh by Salman Faris. The research is qualitative research. The subject of this research was novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh by Salman Faris. The data of this research was focused on the problem of the form and the function of Sasak locality in the novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh which used theory of sociology literature. The validity of the data is obtained by the theory of triangulation test. The data was analyzed by descriptive qualitative, which are description, categorization, inferention, and data presentation. The result of this research shows this fact. First, Sasak locality in the novel Guru Dane dan Guru Onyeh is showed in the several elements, such as: (1) the location, (2) the social system of the Sasak, (3) the belief system (religion) and myth, (4) art of the Sasak, (5) the use of Sasak language, (6) the livelihoods live system of the Sasak, and (7) the technology system and equipment of the Sasak. Second, function of Sasak locality which could build story as a whole, the most dominant effect is the setting, the use of Sasak language (diction), and the last is the name of figure such as Amaq Tembiengbieng, Jero Mihram, Temelak Mangan, and Guru Dane.Keywords: locality, Sasak, sociology literature 

George Washington's Romance: Plotting the Federal City, 1791–1800

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Sarah Luria
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Modern Nation State

Washington, D.C., was born from the marriage of literary, economic, and political revolutions of the late 18th century, when the expansion of the marketplace, the rise of the novel, and the increased circulation of print spawned a bourgeois public sphere and, with it, the modern nation-state. Washington, D.C., was from the start an imagined city, created through the circulation of booster literature to attract investors and so solidify a rational political order. Washington, D.C., arose precisely from this need to ground the imagined landscapes of the Enlightenment, to turn the visionary into the visible and political theory into fact.

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