Provincials and Tropicopolitans: Eighteenth Century Literary Studies and the Un-Making of “Great Britain”

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-437
Author(s):  
Suvir Kaul
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Literary Studies

scholarly journals A Cornish revival? The nascent iconization of a post-obsolescent language

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Dunmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Group Boundaries ◽  
South West

AbstractThis article considers the case of Cornish, a Celtic language that was in decline in the south-west of Great Britain from the early medieval era until the end of the eighteenth century, when its last recorded native speakers died out. At the point when a language under pressure eventually succumbs to forces of language shift, its role in representations of a distinct sociocultural identity might be expected to die with the medium itself. Yet a sense of cohesion at the group level has been observed to endure long after a shift to another language has occurred, with the obsolescent variety retaining a role in the maintenance of group boundaries. In situations of language shift, the meanings of such social constructions can change considerably, and the obsolescent variety may retain ideological associations with the group as an iconized symbol of identity. The analysis presented in this paper is based on an examination of the historical record as well as a synthesis of recent sociological research on Cornish. Attention will be drawn specifically to the manner in which the language has functioned as an icon of identity since the nadir of its decline as a spoken vernacular, through the ‘Cornish Revival’ of the twentieth century to the present day.

scholarly journals Women write the rights of woman: the sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Analysis Programme ◽  
Political Pamphlets

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership.

Epilogue

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Deyermond
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Monograph Series ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Intellectual Power

This chapter comments on the accomplishments and future prospects of medieval studies in Great Britain. It highlights the intellectual power, range and originality of British medievalists of the twentieth century and stresses the need to expand the scope of medieval studies to include other fields such as comparative literary studies. It also discusses the problems of British medieval studies including the compartmentalization of medievalist institutions and the publication of medievalist monograph series devoted to history, or to language and literature, or to other narrower areas.

Up from Middlebrow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Middlebrow Culture ◽  
Two Generations

The Chinese had a word for it—wanbao quanshu. It’s a bibliographic term, which literally means “complete compendia of myriad treasures,” but an alternate translation might be “middlebrow.” These were encyclopedic works that distilled and summarized sophisticated science, history, and politics in cheap, accessible, illustrated guidebooks. Their audience (as a 1933 survey of Shanghai bookstalls confirmed) was neither the educated elite nor the impoverished peasantry, but an intermediate semi-educated class of shop-clerks, apprentices, housewives, workers, and prostitutes. Very few readers had thoroughly mastered the Chinese vocabulary of 50,000 characters, but many more, without much difficulty, had learned 2,000 basic terms, enough to read popular newspapers and wanbao quanshu. The latter commonly ran the subtitle wanshi buqiuren (“myriad matters you won’t need to ask”), which underscored their mission: self-education. They had titles like Riyong wanshi baoku choushi bixu, which could be rendered “Treasury of all daily things necessary for social relations” or (more idiomatically) “How to win friends and influence people.” Wanbao quanshu were the contemporaneous counterparts of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. They flourished in Republican-era China, the same time frame that Joan Shelley Rubin identified as the heyday of American middlebrow culture. In societies where a wide gap opens up between elite and pulp literature, where literacy is growing but access to higher education is still restricted, where modernizing forces arouse both optimism and anxiety, middlebrow bridges those divides and makes sense of rapid change. Those conditions certainly prevailed in China, the United States, and Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but not only then. Middlebrow has a very long history: wanbao quanshu can be traced back to the seventeenth century. And how about eighteenth-century Europe? Two generations ago historians studied the High Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau, one generation ago Robert Darnton discovered a Low Enlightenment of Grub-Street hacks and smut-mongers, and now a team of young scholars at Radboud University in the Netherlands are creating the database MEDIATE: Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors and Texts in Europe (1665–1820).

The Polyglot Moravians in Eighteenth-Century London

2018 ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Alexander Regier
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Book Printing ◽  
Moravian Church

This chapter turns the book’s attention from individuals to institutions, specifically the congregation of the Moravian Church in London. The Moravians came to London from Germany and were an idiosyncratic, exorbitant nonconformist group who had considerable influence, even though it never sought to be at the centre. They remain relatively unknown in literary studies, despite their central role in the formation of Methodism and beyond. As the chapter’s discussion of previously unpublished materials from the extensive Moravian Archive in London reveals, the Moravians were a unique hub for Anglo-German thinking, language acquisition, and bilingual book-printing in eighteenth-century London. In particular, their investment in an aesthetic of the quotidian makes their direct links to Blake and Hamann (Blake’s mother was a Moravian, Hamann visited the London congregation) deeply relevant for the account of the period.

Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

scholarly journals Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780*

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (570) ◽  
pp. 1136-1168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon P Newman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
New World ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
Physical Effects

Abstract This essay explores the experiences of enslaved people who sought to escape their bondage in England and Scotland during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. It argues that, while the conditions of their servitude in Britain may appear closer to those of white British servants than those of enslaved plantation labourers in the colonies, the experiences of these people were conditioned by the experiences of and the threat of return to colonial enslavement. For some successful Britons an enslaved serving boy was a visible symbol of success, and a great many enslaved men, women, youths and children were brought to Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Some accompanied visiting colonists and ships’ officers, while others came to Britain with merchants, planters, clergymen and physicians who were returning home. Some of the enslaved sought to seize freedom by escaping. Utilising newspaper advertisements placed by owners seeking the capture and return of these runaways (as well as advertisements offering enslaved people for sale), the essay demonstrates that many such people were regarded by their masters and mistresses as enslaved chattel property. Runaways were often traumatised by New World enslavement, and all too aware that they might easily be sold or returned to the horrors of Caribbean and American slavery: improved work conditions in Britain did not lessen the psychological and physical effects of enslavement from which they sought to escape.

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