scholarly journals Specimen Poetics

2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dahlia Porter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Botanical Illustrations ◽  
Historical Model

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today.

Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-1750

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
General Point ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Enlightenment

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

scholarly journals Bulgaria in old Serbian accounts of pilgrimage

Balcanica ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Tomislav Jovanovic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
The Road ◽  
The People

A rather small portion of old Slavonic literatures is thematically linked with the journey to the Holy Land. Of many Serbian pilgrims over the centuries only three left more detailed descriptions of Bulgarian places and parts: patriarch Arsenije III, Jerotej of Raca and Silvestar Popovic. They described, each in his own way, some of the places and areas along the road to Istanbul or Salonika. Their vivid depiction of encounters with people and observations about the places they saw on their way reveal only a fragment of life in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman empire. In a seemingly ordinary way, they incorporate into their own epoch the legends heard from the people they met. The descriptions of Bulgarian parts in the Serbian accounts of pilgrimage have all the appeal that generally characterizes travel literature. Although their literary value is modest they belong among the works characterized by the simplicity and immediacy of experience. Rather than being the result of a strong literary ambition, they are witness to the need to speak about the great journey, quite an adventurous enterprise at the time.

Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-502
Author(s):  
David Ross Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Developing Variation ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Transformations ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
First Time ◽  
Variation Process

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.

The Arts

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-195
Author(s):  
Murray Pittock
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Public Display ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Outdoor Environments ◽  
Indoor And Outdoor Environments ◽  
Indoor And Outdoor

The growing circulation of visual art and its widening appearance in domestic collections and public display is an important moniker of the advance of consumerism, cosmopolitanism and innovation. What once had been (and for much of the eighteenth century still remained) an international aristocratic pastime suffused itself steadily into the houses and purchases of the professional well-to-do, bringing with it variety of origin, variety of subject, and whole new genres which could inflect the manner in which indoor and outdoor environments were represented and understood as they came under the control of society’s elites. Such new images could, in their turn, embed the centrality of questions of landscape, geographical conditions and human societies in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who moved in intellectual spheres much removed from the visual arts.

Beyond Rhetoric

2021 ◽  
pp. 322-364
Author(s):  
Danuta Mirka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Multiple Agency

The chapter starts with the discussion of the aesthetic category of “humorous music,” which emerged in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and links it to the theory of multiple agency, proposed by Edward Klorman (2016). There follow two case studies of hypermetric manipulations in the first movements of Haydn’s string quartets Op. 50 No. 3 and Op. 64 No. 1. These analyses reveal how such manipulations act in concert with ingenious deployment of musical topics and contrapuntal-harmonic schemata, and how they affect musical form. The chapter closes with remarks about the role of the first violinist in Haydn’s string quartets.

The Modern Cyclops

Cyclops ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 305-376
Author(s):  
Mercedes Aguirre ◽  
Richard Buxton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Past ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Modern Artists

The period from the eighteenth century till today has witnessed the most innovative explorations of Cyclopean myths since antiquity. Indeed, in visual art, reimaginings of the Cyclopes have arguably been more innovative over the past two-and-a-half centuries than at any time in the past, including antiquity. So far as literary retellings are concerned, the case for the parity of the modern with the ancient—let alone the case for the superiority of the modern—is more difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, some major modern writers have magnificently reappropriated the figure of the Cyclops, and the variety of modern literary takes on these myths is startling. Showing how all this is so is the project of this final chapter. Earlier literary examples include Raspe (on Baron Munchausen), Vico, and Victor Hugo (treated in particular detail); their contemporaries in visual art include James Barry, Flaxman, the Romantics Füssli and Böcklin, and the Symbolists Moreau and Redon. Closer to today, modern artists such as Paolozzi, Oppenheim, and the Abstract Expressionist Baziotes receive attention. In literature, a range of significant figures is discussed, not least Joyce and Ellison. Also covered are developments in cinema, where, even if it can be hard to claim aesthetic quality for many of the screen Cyclopes who appear, their role in forming popular consciousness can hardly be doubted.

Fan Fiction in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Landscape

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-200
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Aesthetic

Chapter 5 examines the reciprocal relationship between authors and their readers who wrote fan fiction, illuminating the aesthetic consequences of fan fiction as part of a text’s dynamic reception. Based on close readings of key texts, including works by once-popular but now largely forgotten authors including Friedrich Nicolai, this chapter demonstrates the potential for interaction between works of fan fiction and their sources. Some source authors responded in footnotes and forewords to the unwanted appropriation of a character. Others wrote new chapters. And some, like Friederike Helene Unger, wrote entire sequels in response to the fan fiction they inspired. The result is a dense network of interlinked texts. This chapter contends that fan fiction gave rise to a unique form of collaborative authorship distinct from the so-called Romantic author.

Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-202
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Deep Thought

The oldest arguments justifying formal analysis of literature, of course, grow out of a longer tradition in aesthetics, one having its roots in the development of a theory of the aesthetic in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, to emphasize the content over the form in literary interpretation is to emphasize forms of aesthetic value other than the beautiful and the sublime: to read for the content, and particularly for the intellectual content, is to value a book because it is deep, thought-provoking, and profound. Yet far from ignoring a text’s aesthetic nature, in fact these latter ways of reading offer the possibility for a renewed justification for literary aesthetics, one especially salient given the deep skepticism that formalist accounts of aesthetic value evoke.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document