scholarly journals VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Martina Domines Veliki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.

Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-172
Author(s):  
Ian Baucom
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Study ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Hossein Nazari ◽  
Maryam Khorasani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pocket Book ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Children's Stories

Eighteenth-century children's authors implicitly exploited the fantastic and the improbable aspects of fairy tales to complement the persuasiveness of their moralistic teachings. Whereas the coexistence of chapbook residue with middle-class pedagogy in eighteenth-century children's books has already been underlined in scholarly studies, little critical attention has been paid to the rhetorical effects exercised by the incorporation of the fantastic and the improbable in eighteenth-century children's stories. Through appealing to the audience's collective imagination, eighteenth-century children's authors both derived from and built upon a set of common aspirations shared by a middle-class audience, thus cultivating a sense of what Kenneth Burke termed consubstantiality among the readers. Focussing on John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and Maria Edgeworth's ‘The Orphans’ (1796), this study explores the modus operandi through which late-eighteenth-century children's authors sought to communicate serious messages by employing improbable plotlines.

Talking Dirty

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
William Tullett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sensory Acuity ◽  
New Consumer ◽  
The Way

In the late eighteenth century, a prize was offered for a new vocabulary to scientifically describe smells. The challenge of describing smells was one which vexed several eighteenth-century writers. This chapter offers a survey of the shifting languages used to describe smells, using close readings alongside some quantification of vocabularies using digital databases. The shifting meanings of smell, odour, odoriferous, odorous, effluvia, perfume, aromatic, agreeable, and disagreeable, all demonstrate some crucial changes in the way scents were described across the eighteenth century. A shift towards more emotive vocabularies of smell and an adjectival intensification in the description of odours were connected to new consumer practices, discourses of politeness, and changing understandings of sensory acuity.

William Wheelright and Early Steam Navigation in the Pacific 1820-1840

1975 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland E. Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
Inland Waters ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

William Wheelwright, an American merchant-mariner and entrepreneur from Massachusetts, was the successful pioneer of commercial steam navigation in the Pacific in 1840 but, as is frequently the case, his predecessors prepared the way. Steam powered the Industrial Revolution from the late eighteenth century, and was soon applied to the movement of ships. Practical steam navigation on sheltered inland waters or open oceans depended upon James Watt's development of the steam engine from 1769 to 1782, including such improvements as the use of expansive steam, external condensers which reduced the loss of heat and power, and double-acting pistons. Inventors quickly adapted the new power mechanism to boats.

Opposition in late eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of the Townshend viceroyalty

1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (88) ◽  
pp. 313-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

Political life in Ireland in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was disturbed by three major opposition campaigns. From 1753 to 1756 there was the so-called money bill dispute in which Henry Boyle (later first earl of Shannon) mounted a formidable and largely successful opposition to the designs of the Dublin Castle administration for replacing him as chief undertaker. The years 1769-71 saw a noisy but ineffective opposition to Viscount Townshend’s plans for re-modelling the way Ireland was governed. And from 1778 to 1783 there was the famous patriot opposition led by Henry Grattan and Henry Flood which won for Ireland ‘a free trade’ and the ‘constitution of ’82’ The first and last ofthese opposition campaigns have been studied in detail; but the opposition to Townshend has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because the result was so unequivocally a victory for the Castle and hence less ‘heroic’ in its outcome than the other two campaigns. This paper sets out in the first instance to correct this imbalance by examining the reasons for the failure of the Irish opposition to Townshend.

Royal Paternalism with a Repressive Face: The Ideology of Poverty in Late Eighteenth-Century France

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-185
Author(s):  
William Olejniczak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Assistance Program ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Cultural Constructions

It is widely acknowledged that great numbers of the laboring poor experienced increasing immiseration throughout France after the 1760s. Less well known perhaps is the corresponding formation of an influential set of cultural constructions that shaped how the poor were understood. This framework, which might be called an “ideology of poverty,” is best seen in the widely diffused discourse on mendicity that appeared after midcentury. At its core stood the notion of the able-bodied mendiant vagabond, or “beggar/vagrant,” who was characterized as a “professional” deviant with a full-blown menacing and illegal état. This cultural construction provided the animating principle of the ideology that not only powerfully shaped royal and local strategies in treating the poor but also helped to screen out multicausal explanations of poverty and frustrate the development of a genuinely humane assistance program for all categories of poor.

Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. M. L. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Conservative Measure ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.

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.

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