Changing Authorities on HMS Bounty: The Public Images of William Bligh and Fletcher Christian in the Context of Late Eighteenth-Century Political and Intellectual Conditions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maike Oergel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

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.”

Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie's “Introductory Discourse”

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Public World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Character Types

In the preface to her first volume of plays, the Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie claims that one is naturally driven to classify persons into character types, and she argues that this classification should be based on the passions individuals express rather than the fashions they wear. Despite this anticonsumerist stance, however, Baillie's project is shaped by the logic of late-eighteenth-century consumerism: Baillie conceives of passions as items susceptible to inventory, display, and sale. Her interest in establishing a human taxonomy grounded in ostensibly natural and subtle discriminations of character allies her works with other popular consumer goods of the period, from clothing fashions to studies of physiognomy. Moreover, like the aesthetic of the picturesque, Baillie's aesthetic encodes a peculiarly consumerist form of desire, a desire that can never be satisfied because it aims at acquisition rather than possession. In Baillie, the feelings and desires on which modern subjectivity is founded do not spring from deep within but are formed by, and find their meaning in, the public world of the marketplace.

Evelina

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Burney ◽  
Vivien Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Aggression ◽  
The Public ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Popular Novel ◽  
The Way

‘Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him! O these fashionable people!’ Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions - as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.

Unveiling Nature: Wonder and Deception in Eighteenth-Century London Shows and Exhibitions

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lavinia Maddaluno
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

This paper examines six exhibitions of machines, clocks, and automata which were performed in the squares, salons and coffee-houses of late eighteenth-century London. It does not take into account those natural philosophers whose enquiries were acknowledged by institutional science, rather focusing on those mechanicks, illusionists, and circus owners (Gulielmo Pittachio, John Joseph Merlin, Benjamin Rackstrow, Henry Breslaw, Philip Astley and James Cox), often collocated in the category of charlatans. By taking into account original advertisements, catalogues and pamphlets, it argues that these shows, with their moments of veiling and unveiling, their dissimilar “methods” to astonish and induce credulity in the beholders, and their separation from institutional venues, were still conceived as places to enlighten and edify the mind, and conveyed concepts such as wonder, deception, curiosity and philosophical understanding to the public.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-321
Author(s):  
Uri Erman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Anti Jewish

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

The Death of the French Atlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Comparative Manner

The Preface places the book in its historiographical context and asks how far the French Atlantic did ‘die’ in the Age of Revolutions. It places the crisis of the late eighteenth century in a transnational context, linking the histories of France and the Caribbean and discussing fortunes of port cities like Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle in a deliberately comparative manner. The book draws heavily on recent work on slavery, the slave trade, and the public memory of slavery that has been so influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and sets out to explain political and moral forces, as well as the purely economic issues, which combined to threaten French colonial prosperity.

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