scholarly journals Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-325
Author(s):  
C. A. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Human Interest ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference

One of the notable changes in English literature during the eighteenth century is a growth in altruism. It is a change which involves not only a breaking down of the old aristocratic indifference to the lower classes of society during the Restoration, but the establishment of a new ethical theory; literature displayed a broader human interest and assigned a new reason for its sympathy. It is usually assumed that the difference is due principally to the influx of French philosophy. This assumption at least minimizes the importance of a development which had taken place in the literature of England itself before the general interest in Rousseau. (The change, especially in poetry, is to be traced largely, I think, to the Characteristics (1711) of Lord Shaftesbury, whose importance as a literary influence in England has never been duly recognized. It has long since been established that his system of philosophy constitutes a turning-point in the history of pure speculation, especially in ethics; it has more recently been shown also that he is responsible for many of the moral ideas which inform the popular literature of Germany from Haller to Herder. But his influence upon the popular writers of his own country has received scant notice.

Contract

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-385
Author(s):  
John Baker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Standard Form ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Third Party ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Privity Of Contract

This chapter explores some lines of development in contract law after 1600. First there were questions flowing from the decision in Slade’s Case – the pleading formulae known as the ‘common counts’ in indebitatus assumpsit were quickly settled and the perjury problems after the disuse of wager of law were dealt with in the Statute of Frauds 1677. Attempts to rationalize consideration in the eighteenth century were unsuccessful save that it became distinct from the requirement of an intention to be bound. The chapter traces the history of privity of contract and of the various attempts to give remedies to third-party beneficiaries. It then discusses the implication of terms into contracts, the difference between conditions and warranties, exclusion clauses, and the problems occasioned by standard-form contracts.

James Bradley and the eighteenth Century 'Gap' in attempts to measure annual stellar parallax

1982 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Annual Cycle ◽  
Important Implication ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Absolute Measurement ◽  
Great Accuracy ◽  
Precision Measurements ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Wrong Direction ◽  
History Of

When, in 1728, James Bradley wrote to Edmund Halley of his ‘new discovered motion of the fixed stars’ (1) Bradley pointed out an important implication of his work for the problem of the detection of the annual parallax of the stars. In conclusion he wrote thus (2): I believe I may venture to say, that in either of the two stars last mentioned [the annual parallax] does not amount to 2". I am of opinion, that if it were 1". I should have perceived it in the great number of observations that I made, especially upon y Draconis; which agreeing with the hypothesis . . . nearly as well when the sun was in conjunction with, as in opposition to, this star, it seems very probable, that the parallax of it is not so great as one single second. This statement has been cited by historians as a decisive turning point in the history of attempts to measure parallax: a turning point in the wrong direction, however, as after this, it is claimed, astronomers no longer sought parallax measurements, believing such small angles to be beyond the limits of even the most sensitive instruments. According to M. A. Hoskin (3): Not surprisingly, Bradley’s revelation of the most incredible delicacy of the required measurements . . . and the apparent near impossibility of maintaining such accuracy over an annual cycle, resulted in a failure of nerve among those few astonomers who possessed instruments capable of precision measurements. And the Canadian astronomer J. D. Fernie suggests that (4): The great accuracy of Bradley’s observations and their failure to detect any star’s parallax seem to have put something of a damper on further attempts at direct absolute measurement for the remainder of the eighteenth century.

The Trouble with Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Definition Of

This book argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, I claim that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which—in the words of one critic—“literature solves no problems and saves no souls.” This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first chapter contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third chapters focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth chapter treats the work of Kant, Kierkegaard, and J. M. Coetzee.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

Postscript

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Carruthers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Major Turning Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
British State ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The interwar period marked a major turning point in the history of Scottish literature. The story of Scots before MacDiarmid’s recasting of it as synthetic Lallans was happily enmeshed in the experience of Britishness and of Britain’s imperial expansion overseas. As far back as the eighteenth century, Scots and English were viewed by Scots philologists as Saxon–British cognates. The emergence of an antithetical relationship of Scots and English was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, MacDiarmid entirely reconceptualized the relationship of Scottish literature to the post-1707 British state. A partner nation of enthusiastic imperialists was reimagined as an oppressed colony. Scottish literature, both its practitioners and its critics, embarked on a process of forgetting Scotland’s complicity in Britishness and Empire.

The Oxford History of English Literature. Volume 8. The Mid-Eighteenth Century

1981 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 674
Author(s):  
Ronald Paulson ◽  
John Butt ◽  
Geoffrey Carnall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
History Of

Grotius in the Science of Law

1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roscoe Pound
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Almost All

It has been customary to take Grotius's book for the starting point of one of the best marked eras in the history of jurisprudence. Any account of the development of theories of justice is likely to begin the modern history of the subject with Grotius, and to put as a classical epoch a period designated as “from Grotius to Kant.” Any account of theories of law is likely to set off a period from the revived study of Roman law in the Italian universities of the twelfth century to Grotius, and another from Grotius to the breaking up of the eighteenth century law-of-nature school. In almost all accounts of the history of the science of law, Grotius stands as marking a turning point.

Defining Ottoman Realism in the Uppsala Mecca Painting

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-245
Author(s):  
Deniz Beyazıt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Landscape Composition ◽  
Linear Perspective ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work Functions

Abstract This article analyzes a little-known painting of the sanctuary at Mecca in the Uppsala University Library, Sweden—one of the most sophisticated depictions of its kind. Datable to ca. 1700 and attributable to Cairo, the painting is among the earliest known depictions of the Holy Places in an illusionistic style with a bird’s-eye view, composed according to linear perspective. With minutely rendered details accompanied by more than seventy inscriptions, the work functions as an early map of Mecca. The Uppsala Mecca painting exemplifies the complexity of artistic exchange between Europe and the Ottoman world, which yielded highly original results. This discussion sheds light on the long, hybrid journey of Ottoman art towards realism, applied to a large-scale topographic landscape composition. The work marks a turning point in the history of Mecca painting and served as a model for European prints, through which the imagery spread all the way to East Asia. This study attempts to unravel the mysterious origins of the painting in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Egypt and the power struggles to control Egypt, the Hijaz, and the Hajj.

XXI. Whig Panegyric Verse, 1700-1760

PMLA ◽  
1926 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Party System ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Complete Development ◽  
Great Body ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Though of slight intrinsic value, Whig poetry of the eighteenth century constitutes a distinct chapter in the history of English literature. The earlier interest of poetry relating to affairs of state had almost invariably taken the form of personal eulogy, satire, or violent invective—types produced in extraordinary abundance during the Restoration. While such verse continued to flourish indefinitely, the complete development of the party system of government enabled poetry to acquire a much broader and more influential sphere. The great body of Whig verse written in the eighteenth century is devoted to the expression of party ideals; it is concerned with principles rather than personalities. This change of function, deeply significant for the future relation of politics and belles lettres, arose largely from the fact that poets were irresistibly attracted by what Chevrillon calls the psychology of Whiggism. Fortunately for the Whig cause, the versifiers contrived to find in the Whig dogma the political embodiment of the most popular moral sentiments of the age. The advocacy of Whiggism thus became a phase of a sentimental movement which, beginning early in the century, eventually “spread like a mildew over the whole surface of literature.”

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