Periodicals and the Problem of Women’s Learning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Robert Wood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gender Difference ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Culture Of Learning ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Selection Of

One of the questions published in the 23 May 1691 issue of The Athenian Mercury (1690-7) was ‘Whether it be proper for Women to be Learned?’ In this essay, James Wood takes the question of the propriety of women's education and the learned woman as a lens through which to read a selection of periodicals and magazines from the 1690s to the 1820s. Through detailed case studies of the Ladies’ Diary (1704–1841), Ladies Mercury (1693), Female Tatler (1709–10), Female Spectator (1744–6), Lady’s Museum (1760–6), and Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), Wood elucidates how periodicals offer unique insights into: how women participated in the wider culture of learning across the long eighteenth century; how learning was incorporated into women’s lives; how women’s learning was understood and variously negotiated by the periodical press; and the role that gender difference played in what in meant to be learned across the long eighteenth century.

XXI: Mortality in Magherafelt, County Derry, in the early eighteenth century reappraised

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (89) ◽  
pp. 50-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Macafee ◽  
Valerie Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Tax Returns ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Patterns

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

Gothic Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Townshend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This book seeks to provide the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction, poetry, drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the literature/architecture relation is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains no monograph-length study of the intriguing interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only cursory treatment in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. Addressing this gap in scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of texts. In turn, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its ‘survivalist’ and ‘revivalist’ forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was much more than a matter of style. Incarnating the memory of a vanished ‘Gothic’ age in the enlightened present, Gothic architecture, whether ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s past—a notable ‘visionary’ turn in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. Through initiating a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, the book argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

Criss-Crossing the Channel

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Dow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
French Novel ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This essay examines the reception of the French novel in Britain in the long eighteenth century and argues that prose fiction in the period developed through translation. Through case studies of novelist-translators, and some of the most important and influential French fictions such as La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (1731–42), Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore (1782), the essay focuses on the French novel in translation, and on British readers of these fictions. Particular attention is paid to women translators, a largely neglected group. Moreover, the roman de sensibilité is prioritized over the roman-à-thèse, since it is through these largely forgotten and now unfashionable works that the ways in which fiction criss-crossed the Channel in the long eighteenth century can best be observed.

scholarly journals Acts of Aesthetics: Publishing as Recursive Agency in the Long Eighteenth Century

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Algee-Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Potential Solution ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Printed Materials ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural World ◽  
Selection Of

Of primary concern to late eighteenth-century society was the sheer volume of printed work being produced in England. The response of authors troubled by this perceived crisis was an outpouring of works on taste, aesthetics, genre and literature, which attempted to describe and provide corrective solutions to the problem of over-publication. Yet this response itself, of course, only added to the number of works within Britain. How did the solution to a deluge of print become more printed materials? Did these authors envision print’s agency as a self-corrective process? And, if so, how can we recover and perhaps even model the connections between works that encompassed the responses to print? This essay outlines a potential solution to this problem by sampling a highly focused selection of digitized texts that raise the issue of over-publication. Through a quantitative analysis of these texts, it identifies the lexical patterns that may reveal the ways in which authors of the period envisioned the work of aesthetics. In particular, this article identifies an emerging consensus on how printed objects became agents within the socio-cultural world of the long eighteenth century: both as objects which could act on readers and as objects which could act on other printed texts. By comparing the language that these clusters of texts deploy to discuss the agency of print to their traditional generic, theoretical or historical groupings, we can begin to examine the process by which the potential power of print became the solution to the dangers it, itself, presented.

Fictions, Libels, and Unions in the Long Eighteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Keymer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter considers the literary representation of union by way of three case studies: Jonathan Swift’s ‘The Story of the Injured Lady’ (written 1707, published 1746), Thomas Finn’s ‘The Painter Cut’ (1810), and Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771). Their polemical energy notwithstanding, the allegories of Swift and Finn also display tensions and articulate contradictions typifying the eighteenth century’s figurations of union. These complications may be explained in part as defences against possible prosecution, but they also imply mixed feelings about nationalist commitment, and an awareness of the conceptual or practical incoherence of unitary national identity. Smollett takes such tendencies to their extreme in his masterpiece Humphry Clinker, which juxtaposes multiple conflicting perspectives on union, and plays ironically on the anti-union rhetoric of Fletcher of Saltoun. He fashions the novel, a generation before Scott, as a genre uniquely equipped to address national identity in all its mobility and multiplicity.

“Splendid Deformities”. An Emancipatory Critique of Cultural Homogeneity in Sin-ying Ho’s Deformed Ceramics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Burchmore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Selection Of

This paper identifies an aesthetic of deformation in contemporary porcelain sculptures by Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist Sin-ying Ho. A selection of these are discussed with reference to three historic case-studies in ceramic deformity: wares that have been malformed when fired due to negligence, lack of vigilance, or misfortune; wares that have transformed in the kiln due to allegedly mysterious powers; and the eighteenth-century fashion for chinoiserie as a style of the monstrous, deformed and obscene. With reference to these case studies, it is argued that Sin-ying Ho’s ceramic sculptures represent deformity as something to be celebrated, endorsing an emancipatory narrative of diversity and open-minded tolerance.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

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