scholarly journals Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: Communication Circuits in Eighteenth-Century France

2004 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT DARNTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Communication Circuits ◽  
History Of ◽  
Louis Xv

ABSTRACT In 1745 a chambermaid in Versailles was shut up in the Bastille for publishing a roman àà clef about the sex life of Louis XV. In attempting to get to the bottom of the case, the police uncovered some remarkable information about how oral media and print culture intersected. Their investigation opens up some broad issues related to the history of women, authorship, reading, and public opinion.

‹ Rococo › : du jargon à la catégorie de style

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-487
Author(s):  
Marie-Pauline Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Louis Xv ◽  
Objective Existence

Abstract Today there is a consensus on the definition of the term ‘rococo’: it designates a style both particular and homogeneous, artistically related to the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. But we must not forget that in its primitive formulations, the rococo has no objective existence. As a witty, sneering, and impertinent word, it can adapt itself to the most varied discourses and needs, far beyond references to the eighteenth century. Its malleability guarantees its sparkling success in different languages, but also its highly contradictory uses. By tracing the genealogy of the word ‘rococo’, this article will show that the association of the term with the century of Louis XV is a form of historical discrimination that still prevails widely in the history of the art of the Enlightenment.

Monarchy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joël Félix
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Reform Initiatives ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Social ◽  
Major Reform ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Louis Xv

This chapter examines the social and political structures of the absolute monarchy. It explores the extent to which tensions and conflicts in the mid-eighteenth century, in particular disputes between government and parlements, divided the elites over reform and policy, and opened up the realm of politics to public opinion. Reviewing the fate of major reform initiatives through the reigns of both Louis XV and his grandson Louis XVI, it argues that political crises paralysed the ability of royal institutions to enforce authority and generate consensus, thus making the transition from the old regime to the modern world necessary and inevitable.

Lecky’s Leaders of public opinion in Ireland

1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (54) ◽  
pp. 119-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donal McCartney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
History Of

The great Anglo-Irish historian, W.E.H. Lecky, was born in Dublin in 1838. He is best remembered for his volumes on Ireland and England in the eighteenth century (begun in the 1870s and completed in the 1890s). His European reputation had already been made with his History of the rise and inpuence of the spirit of rationalism in Europe (1865), and his History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869).

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley: Piracy, Print Culture, and Irish Gothic Fiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-244
Author(s):  
Christina Morin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Published in Dublin by the prominent Catholic printing firm of James Hoey, The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760) has been identified in recent years as an earlier Irish gothic fiction than Horace Walpole's putatively pioneering gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). The discovery that Sophia Berkley is, in fact, a re-print of an earlier London publication, The History of Amanda (1758), casts significant doubt on the novel's contribution to the development of Irish gothic literature. This article argues that attention to the particulars of the novel's publication history as well as its later misidentification paints a revealing picture of popular publishing in Dublin in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It further contends that Sophia Berkley's identification as early Irish gothic – although mistaken – has proven instrumental in scholarly re-evaluations of late-eighteenth century Irish gothic literary production.

scholarly journals The 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill and the Polemic over Credit

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avinoam Yuval-Naeh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Financial Market ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Partisan Conflict ◽  
Practical Impact

AbstractThe polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.

Sir William Jones and English Literature

1946 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 686-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. De Sola Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Late Professor ◽  
James Macpherson ◽  
History Of ◽  
General Culture ◽  
Sir William Jones

The Cambridge History of English Literature dismisses Sir William Jones in one short paragraph at the end of the chapter by the late Professor Saintsbury on “The Lesser Poets of the Eighteenth Century”. Here he is described as “more of an orientalist and a jurist than a poet”, and brief commendation is given to his Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus and his Epigram from the Persian. There is no mention either of his other English works or his influence on English poetry. None of the shorter histories of English literature, as far as I know, alludes to him at all, although they all devote a good deal of space to the so-called “Precursors of Romanticism” in the eighteenth century. Professor R. M. Hewitt in his valuable essay, Harmonious Jones, the best appreciation of Sir William Jones as an English writer which has hitherto appeared, has pointed out that “recent histories of literature, though they still find room for James Macpherson, omit even the name of Sir William Jones, whose influence on poetry and on public opinion and general culture has been both more extensive and more permanent”.

Assimilating the Novel: Reviews and Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
British Culture

This chapter looks at the novel's assimilation into British culture between 1750 and 1820. During this period, the vast majority of theories and histories of the novel were introduced not through formal critical studies like John Dunlop's The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age (1814), but rather through an array of other publications that helped constitute print culture in these years. Of these other acts of publishing, the chapter focuses on the activities of eighteenth-century literary reviews and anthologies, particularly on large reprinted collections of novels published after 1774.

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