scholarly journals Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-133
Author(s):  
Claire Gallien ◽  
Olivera Jokic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism

The Discussion of Taste, from 1750 To 1770, and the New Trends in Literary Criticism

PMLA ◽  
1934 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 577-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Niles Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Standard Of Taste ◽  
The Aesthetic

The attempts to define and to arrive at a standard of taste lie at the heart of the aesthetic inquiries that were being carried on in eighteenth-century England. That such inquiries, by examining certain fundamental assumptions of traditional æsthetics, exerted an influence on the theory and practice of literary criticism, is a commonplace. But why and how this influence was felt has not been explained. Its importance can be gauged by the fact that within a period of twenty years several of the ablest minds in England and Scotland, including Burke, Hume, Hogarth, Reynolds, Kames, and Gerard—most of them interested in literary criticism—were focussed upon the problem of taste. It was not a coincidence that in the years from 1750 to 1770, when the search for a standard of taste was at its height, the old assumptions of literary criticism were crumbling and the new “romantic” principles were being set forth, sometimes timidly and sometimes boldly, by the Wartons, Young, Hurd, Kames, and many others. The relation between these two phenomena is the subject of this study.

Herder’s Kritische Wälder: A Vegetal Topography of Critique

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-138
Author(s):  
Anna-Lisa Baumeister
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Organizational Form ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Concrete Composition ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Central Case ◽  
Meta Theory

Johann Gottfried Herder’s Kritische Wälder [Critical Forests] capture the project of literary critique in an apparent oxymoron. The title of the essay compilation (containing altogether four diminutive forests or Wäldchen) features vegetative life [Wälder] alongside discourse [Kritik], which, in the eighteenth century as much as today, is generally regarded as the opposite of what is “natural.” Against readings that understand Herder’s vegetal poetological metaphors as essentialist “fictions”104 of immediate cultural production, I argue that Herder’s Kritische Wälder (1769) enact a materialist meta-theory of literary criticism that is modeled after the organizational form of the forest, in conversation with eighteenth-century Forstbotanik. Herder’s notion of Kritische Wälder challenges the paradigm of the critic as “weeder” prevalent in eighteenth-century hermeneutics, whose task it is to cultivate a critical literary discourse through the removal of improper readings. The Wälder, in contrast, envision Kritik as an interdependent cycle of productive overgrowth, accumulation, and decay, Zufall being the condition of its vitality. Taking Herder’s model of Kritik as a central case in point, my reading relates the shift from philological to speculative criticism around 1800 to concurrent developments in Forstbotanik. I show how Herder responds to central questions of the Forstbotanik of his era, suggesting, as he does, that forests are functioning systems. On a different level, my argument also contributes to the histories of genius and the organic work of art, illustrating intersubjective and materialist facets of the concepts. I make my argument, first, by situating Herder’s Kritische Wälder in the context of visions of the proper forest in eighteenth-century Forstbotanik and hermeneutics and, second, by highlighting the concrete composition of Herder’s text as a collection and recycling of discarded materials from former projects.

The Letters in the Story

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Tavor Bannet
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Epistolary Novels

The long tradition of mixta-genera fiction, particularly favoured by women novelists, which combined fully-transcribed letters and third-person narrative has been largely overlooked in literary criticism. Working with recognized formal conventions and typical thematic concerns, Tavor Bannet demonstrates how narrative-epistolary novels opposed the real, situated, transactional and instrumental character of letters, with their multi-lateral relationships and temporally shifting readings, to merely documentary uses of letters in history and law. Analyzing issues of reading and misreading, knowledge and ignorance, communication and credulity, this study investigates how novelists adapted familiar romance plots centred on mysteries of identity to test the viability of empiricism's new culture of fact and challenge positivism's later all-pervading regime of truth. Close reading of narrative-epistolary novels by authors ranging from Aphra Behn and Charlotte Lennox to Frances Burney and Wilkie Collins tracks transgenerational debates, bringing to light both what Victorians took from their eighteenth-century forbears and what they changed.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archival Work ◽  
Century Literature

The Introduction raises the main questions answered by the book: how were characters regulated before the existence of intellectual property laws? Why does fan fiction proliferate after 1750? And how did fan fiction and its rules affect authorship and the law? It further provides a brief history of fan fiction from Homer to Goethe and offers an explanation of the methodology used in this text, combining legal anthropology, literary criticism, and historical analysis based on archival work. The Introduction places the work within existing scholarship on legal history, studies of eighteenth-century literature and the book trade, and intellectual property law.

Review of Locke's Essay and the Rhetoric of Science by Peter Walmsley

Locke Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 225-230
Author(s):  
G. A. J. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
John Locke ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Rhetoric Of Science ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

From at least Kenneth MacLean’s John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1936) Locke’s Essay has been the subject of a large number of works that are classified as contributions to literary criticism. Indeed, it is doubtful if any other work of philosophy in English has attracted such attention. The reasons for this are undoubtedly overdetermined. No other work of modern philosophy, and perhaps no other work of any kind, had such an impact as did Locke’s on the eighteenth century. But Walmsley’s is not an attempt to chart that impact. Rather, it sets out to examine Locke’s language and relate it to his contemporaries, especially those who would now be regarded as scientists, even though the term in Locke’s day did not exist. It was Locke’s fellow members of the Royal Society, the virtuosi of Oxford and London and their fellow-travellers, to whom the Essay was addressed, and his language shared their common assumptions about the world at large and our place in it. It was Locke’s task in part to provide argument for those assumptions and to provide a grounding for a view of the world that was to hold sway—indeed, perhaps it still does—for at least a century.

Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

2000 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Christopher Johnson ◽  
Ellen Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism
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