Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-216
Author(s):  
Noelle Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
British Society ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Artistic Representation

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that ultimately, venereal disease was used to explore many of the fundamental institutions on which eighteenth-century British society was based: patriarchy, consumer capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy. While it was only one of many metaphors that could be used to address these concerns, its potency and flexibility meant that it remained prominent not just in the literature and art of the Restoration and the 1700s, but also well beyond. Its persistence as a topic of literary and artistic representation likely speaks not only to the longevity of systems like patriarchy and consumerism, but also to our ongoing fascination with the human body and its complexities.

Maiden Voyage

Nuncius ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
Dario De Santis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Microscopic Investigation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Scientific Debate

AbstractThe scientific debate which developed during the eighteenth century, proposed and diffused new theories on the generation not only within the scientific community. Microscopic investigation and various experimental campaigns fostered daring models attempting to unveil the natural phenomena from which life originates. Besides the famous scientific and philosophical works that marked the age, in the second part of the century two pamphlets appeared that well represent the importance of the querelle about embryological systems defining the concept of generation as a voyage within the human body. Lucina sine concubitu and Juno abortans, respectively published in England and in Germany between 1750 and 1760, narrate the odd and imaginary adventures of two doctors who are trying to interrupt and modify the embryos' journey towards the body of the mother.

Aristotle's Approach to Poetry

1981 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
B. R. Rees
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Structural Pattern ◽  
Classical Text ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
First Time

These are the opening words of Aristotle's Poetics, generally recognized as the most influential work in the history of Western European drama and poetic theory since the Renaissance. The initial statement of the scope of the inquiry is a formidable one; but a reader coming to it for the first time might well be forgiven for concluding that it promises far more than it achieves. Is it possible, he might ask, that all this is contained in a slim volume occupying no more than 47 pages in the Oxford Classical Text and 45 in the Penguin translation? Reading further, he might become even more disillusioned: what he discovers is that, after a very brief and perfunctory introduction on poetry as a form of mimesis or artistic representation, Aristotle limits himself to a discussion of tragedy, a cursory treatment of epic, and a few passing references to comedy, and that, even in the case of tragedy, by far the major part of the argument is devoted to an examination of plot. Can this really be the work which excited scholars in the Renaissance, inspired Milton to write Samson Agonistes, an Aristotelian drama if there ever was one, provided the structural pattern and dramatic conventions for the plays of Racine and Corneille, gave Fielding the principles on which he based his Tom Jones, influenced Goethe and Lessing and, through Lessing, Coleridge, and has won the attention and admiration of critics writing in English from James Harris at the end of the eighteenth century to Richard MacKeon in the second half of the twentieth? And, if so, why?

The Artist-Philosopher

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-77
Author(s):  
Kate Fullagar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
British Society ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
The World

Chapter 2, much like Chapter 1, traces the first several decades of an eighteenth-century life, dwelling on what childhood can reveal about a whole society; when lives might be said to begin in a given culture; and how the protagonist moved within his world to reach mid-life. Its focus is the artist--philosopher Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’s life embodies a deep conflict in British society of the time—the conflict over empire. We see Reynolds’s character develop gradually as both conservatively sceptical about Britain’s recent expansionist thrust into the world and keenly eager to make the most of all that imperial commerce was now bringing into his native country. Reynolds’s ambivalence is also reflected in his art theories, local politics, and even domestic life. While narrating his rise to artistic pre-eminence (and a philosophical devotion to neoclassical aesthetics), the chapter also shows how Reynolds built increasingly close friendships to key male literary figures of the time—especially Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. Through his connection to the Tory Johnson and the Whiggish Burke, we get a glimpse into Reynolds’s otherwise elusive, hard-to-read political views—especially during Britain’s greatest imperial push to date, the Seven Years War.

Officers and Gentlemen

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-61
Author(s):  
Noelle Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
Disease Focus ◽  
Sexual Promiscuity

This chapter asks what imaginative representations of venereal disease say about Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward gender and sexuality. It does so by considering the portrayal of venereal infections in men. It is no coincidence that many of the positive representations of the disease focus on male rather than female subjects. It has been suggested that the sexual double standard (whereby men were applauded for sexual promiscuity and women punished for it) played some role in shaping imaginative representations of the infection. However, so too did a culture that linked infection to manliness and male power. While historians working with medical texts from the early modern period have tended to conclude that the disease was seen as originating with, and spread by, women, many eighteenth-century literary and artistic works imagine venereal disease as male—as a condition predominantly experienced by men, caused by male sexual indiscretion, and passed on by philandering husbands to their faithful wives and innocent children.

scholarly journals Fallen women and the London Lock Hospital Laws and By-Laws of 1840 (revised 1848)

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
María Isabel Romero Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
British Society ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Standard Code ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Lock Hospital

The nineteenth century witnessed a huge increase in both private and public institutions to control and to contain two elements deemed to be the most dangerous in British society: the prostitute and the fallen woman. These individuals were considered deviant at a time when the middle-class exercised philanthropy supporting the double standard code of morality. Charity and state intervention were carried out by two kinds of institutions which were closely connected: lock hospitals and lock asylums. However, the role of lock hospitals was to cure venereal disease, whereas the role of the lock asylums was the reformation and instruction of these women. As a consequence, this paper seeks to examine the importance of the London Lock Hospital and Asylum Laws and By-laws of 1840, especially in relation to female patients and penitents, so as to ascertain the roles of these two institutions in the reproduction of the moral standards of the middle-class and of the religious discourse of the time. We shall see that these regulations reflect the ideas of industriousness, repentance and atonement for these women’s past lives, emphasizing the differences between the sexes as far as sexual and moral behaviour were concerned.

Syphilis and Sociability

2018 ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Leigh Wetherall-Dickson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Private Identity

This essay considers the stain on one’s position within civil society represented by venereal disease. Drawing on the diaries of Boswell – for whom regular doses of syphilis seem to have been regarded as an amatory hazard – and Neville, the essay explores the increasing prominence and importance of the sphere of sociable intercourse in the eighteenth century, which necessitates, for Boswell at least, a clear division between his private selfhood and conduct and his public demeanour. In contrast, Neville’s episodes of the pox seem to have exacerbated his incipient paranoia and annoyance with a world around him that refuses to acknowledge his gentlemanly qualities. Both men’s reaction to their condition as related through their diaries reveals for Leigh Wetherall-Dickson a shifting notion of private identity formed in response to the relatively new phenomenon of sociable intercourse.

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