scholarly journals Beauplaisir as a Disabled Libertine in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or Love in a Maze

Author(s):  
Difeng Chueh ◽  

This paper aims to explore Beauplaisir’s disabled libertine identity in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or Love in a Maze (1725) in order to understand how “disability” was conceptualized by eighteenth-century authors. Beauplaisir is a libertine obsessed with pursuits of sexual pleasure with various women. In those sexual adventures, Beauplaisir constructs his abled libertine identity through his observation skills. In fact, Beauplaisir’s observation skills also render him disabled. Haywood’s portrayal of Beauplaisir’s disabled libertine identity offers another way to examine meanings of disability in eighteenth-century literary works. As I will contend, the definition of “disability” was not limited to a person’s physical or mental impairment in the eighteenth century. Instead, an eighteenth-century person could become disabled when s/he lost certain qualifications for becoming a member of a particular group. The word “disabled” or “disability” was used in this way by eighteenth-century writers such as Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift. As I will show, Beauplaisir’s disabled libertine identity is a result of his being excluded from the abled libertine group. This exclusion results from a trick imposed on him by Fantomina. Thus, examinations of Beauplaisir’s disabled libertine identity will point out another side of “disability.”

Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Lennox ◽  
Margaret Anne Doody

The Female Quixote (1752), a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment. With an excellent introduction and full explanatory notes, this edition will be of particular interest to students of women's literature, and of the eighteenth-century novel.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-487
Author(s):  
Marie-Pauline Martin

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.


2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.


Author(s):  
Kate Fullagar

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Ehsan Ghabool ◽  
Mina Ravansalar

Imagology is a branch of comparative literature which explores the image of one nation in the literature of another nation. One Thousand Nights and One Night is among the important books which can show the image of different nations and people such as Indians, Iranians and Arabs. Since the oldest version of the book is in Arabic, it is considered an Arabic literary work though it was translated from a Persian tale in the first place. On this basis the study of the image of Iranians in One Thousand Nights and One Night can be included under the definition of imagology. In this article, first we explain, analyze and study the image of Iranians in the book One Thousand Nights and One Night with respect to 1. anthropology (including entertainments, personification of animals, disapprobation of lies and betrayal of spouses), 2. religious and mythical beliefs (including the belief in daevas and jinnis, magic, fire-worshipping and similar plots), 3. politics (emphasizing the position of vizier and his family in government), 4. economics (emphasizing economic prosperity), then we will compare the collected information with the image of Iranians in credited works and in this way we will identify the similarities and differences of Iranians’ image in One Thousand Nights and One Night and the above-said literary works. Finally we come to this conclusion that the similarities belong to the real image of Iranians in the pre-Islamic days and that differences show the image of post-Islamic Iran which is added through Arabic translation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Susan E. Brown

Abstract This paper examines the intersection between the debate on women and the wider political debates of late eighteenth-century England. During this period the meaning of concepts such as liberty, equality, and rights was contested not only with regard to political relationships among men, but also as they applied to civil and domestic relationships between men and women. The language of politics encouraged the definition of women's oppression in terms of the unrepresentative nature of authority exercised by men. The values of rationality, equality, and independence espoused by radicals in the debate on women were part of a larger conception of virtue, which carried with it political as well as moral implications. These political implications came to the fore in the conservative response. Conservatives' ideas on women were part of a larger vision of social and political order in which duty, obedience, and dependence operated as the unifying principles. Within this framework, radical proposals for a more egalitarian family structure were viewed as a potential threat to political order. At the heart of this debate lay not only a dispute regarding the condition of women, but also a struggle between two conflicting visions of the ideal society.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document