The Way In

The Closet ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 12-40
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker

This chapter outlines the broad historical and conceptual foundations for the focused explorations on the closet. It analyzes the domestic privacy and modern selfhood that has overshadowed the closet's origins as a site of politicized intimacy and its flexibility as a locus of interpersonal relations in eighteenth-century Britain. It also assesses how the emergence of democratic social feelings has generally directed attention away from the closet and toward more obviously heterogeneous scenes of sociability, such as the coffee house. The chapter considers the closet's peculiar aptness as a setting and symbol of social transition. It explains how the closet is widely recognized as a place where reciprocal feelings could flourish against a backdrop of rigid status distinctions and how it revealed the exhilarating and also uncomfortable new processes and prospects of inclusion.

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-329
Author(s):  
BARRIE TABRAHAM

John Wesley. The evangelical revival and the rise of Methodism in England. By John Munsey Turner. Pp. x+214. Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2002. £14.95 (paper). 0 7162 0556 4Wesley and the Wesleyans. Religion in eighteenth-century Britain. By John Kent. Pp. vi+229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. £37.50 (cloth), £13.95 (paper). 0 521 45532 4; 0 521 45555 3A brand plucked from the burning. The life of John Wesley. By Roy Hattersley. Pp. vii+451+18 plates. London: Little, Brown, 2002. £20. 0 316 86020 4Mirror of the soul. The diary of an early Methodist preacher, John Bennet, 1714–1754. Edited and introduced by S. R. Valentine. Pp. xii+243 incl. 2 frontispieces. Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2002. £15 (paper). 1 85852 216 1The tercentenary of John Wesley's birth saw the appearance of a whole crop of studies on various aspects of the Wesleys and early Methodism. Whether the current conversations between Methodists and Anglicans concerning the Covenanting Proposals is providing an additional spur remains to be seen. However, there can be no doubt that there is continued interest in the Wesleys and the way that Methodism developed, particularly in the eighteenth century, as the following four studies show in their very different ways.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Priya Satia

Abstract This article briefly summarizes the place of guns in British society and culture in the long eighteenth century. My approach is that of a historical anthropologist, examining the meaning of guns from the way they were used and depicted. I examine the way guns were used and understood in civilian and military realms, especially their meaning and role in the expansion of the British Empire. Finally, the essay discusses whether and how this history should influence our understanding of the Second Amendment, which was written in the eighteenth century. It concludes that history substantiates both sides of the current debate about gun use in America and that we must therefore turn to other ethical systems of judgment to resolve that debate.


Author(s):  
Abigail Zitin

In early eighteenth-century Britain, writers asked after the nature and causes of the pleasure we feel when we encounter beauty. It took a painter, however, to steer the nascent field of philosophical aesthetics toward questions of spatial form. Drawing inspiration from William Hogarth’s 1753 treatise on beauty, this book traces the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics. Hogarth’s experience as a draftsman and printmaker guided his dissent from the developing consensus on aesthetic pleasure and standards of taste. The immediate cause of aesthetic pleasure, he argues, is beautiful form, which is detected through the activity of formal abstraction. The insight that formal abstraction has heuristic value in judging beauty emerges from the way practitioners think about skill across the domains of art and craft. Zitin’s account of the history of form in eighteenth-century thought substitutes women and artisans, as virtuosos of aesthetic judgment, for the proverbial man of taste, a substitution with the power to reshape our understanding of canonical statements on aesthetics from the writings of Shaftesbury to Kant’s Third Critique.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Berry

Ray's most widely read book was his Wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation (1691), probably based on addresses given in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge 20 years previously. In it he forswore the use of allegory in biblical interpretation, just as he had done in his (and Francis Willughby's) Ornithology (1678). His discipline seeped into theology, complementing the influence of the Reformers and weakening Enlightenment assumptions about teleology, thus softening the hammer-blows of Darwinism on Deism. The physico-theology of the eighteenth century and the popularity of Gilbert White and the like survived the squeezing of natural theology by Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises a century after Wisdom … , and contributed to a peculiarly British understanding of natural theology. This undergirded the subsequent impact of the results of the voyagers and geologists and prepared the way for a modern reading of God's “Book of Works” (“Darwinism … under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend”). Natural theology is often assumed to have been completely discredited by Darwin (as well as condemned by Barth and ridiculed by Dawkins). Notwithstanding, and despite the vapours of vitalism (ironically urged – among others – by Ray's biographer, Charles Raven) and the current fashion for “intelligent design”, the attitudes encouraged by Wisdom … still seem to be robust, albeit needing constant re-tuning (as in all understandings influenced by science).


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Connolly

In a recent article Fred Ablondi compares the different approaches to occasionalism put forward by two eighteenth-century Newtonians, Colin Maclaurin and Andrew Baxter. The goal of this short essay is to respond to Ablondi by clarifying some key features of Maclaurin's views on occasionalism and the cause of gravitational attraction. In particular, I explore Maclaurin's matter theory, his views on the explanatory limits of mechanism, and his appeals to the authority of Newton. This leads to a clearer picture of the way in which Maclaurin understood gravitational attraction and the workings of nature.


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Lenman

This article begins with the idea that there was a vigorous political life in Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century which could focus on issues other than Jacobitism or government patronage. The article focuses on the non-dynastic issues in Scottish politics that predated the Union and which carried on into the Westminster parliament to the accompaniment of considerable activism in Scotland, and a distinctive contribution from Scottish members of both houses of the legislature. The example here examined is the burning issue of securing commercial access to the forbidden lands of Spanish America. Studying it reveals very clearly that ‘The theme of Scotland's partial integration into the British state’ and the way in which it ‘was never wholly successful’, goes back to the very start of the eighteenth century.


2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 141-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Grant

In recent years, music theorists and analysts have devoted a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of hypermeter, drawing some of their most representative examples from the late works of Haydn. Although this recent trend in analysis has shed much light on Haydn’s music, it has left questions of history distinct from the mode of listening it engages. This article argues that the way we understand conceptualizations of listening and aesthetic experience can greatly inform the way that we understand hypermeter and the question of style in history. Drawing on eighteenth-century theories of music and literature, it recontextualizes Haydn’s hypermetric style with respect to a larger world of aesthetic experience.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Liis Jõhvik

Abstract Initially produced in 1968 as a three-part TV miniseries, and restored and re-edited in 2008 as a feature-length film, Dark Windows (Pimedad aknad, Tõnis Kask, Estonia) explores interpersonal relations and everyday life in September 1944, during the last days of Estonia’s occupation by Nazi Germany. The story focuses on two young women and the struggles they face in making moral choices and falling in love with righteous men. The one who slips up and falls in love with a Nazi is condemned and made to feel responsible for the national decay. This article explores how the category of gender becomes a marker in the way the film reconstructs and reconstitutes the images of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The article also discusses the re-appropriation process and analyses how re-editing relates to remembering of not only the filmmaking process and the wartime occupation, but also the Estonian women and how the ones who ‘slipped up’ are later reintegrated into the national narrative. Ultimately, the article seeks to understand how this film from the Soviet era is remembered as it becomes a part of Estonian national filmography.


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