Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

Author(s):  
Pam Perkins

Pam Perkins examines the role played by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals in both demarcating and blurring contemporary ideas around feminine writing. The essay provides an overview of critical attitudes about women’s writing and the way it was treated in major Romantic-era periodicals (the Edinburgh Review, British Critic, Anti-Jacobin), and then complicates this picture with case studies in the receptions of the writers Anne Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton, whose work pushed back against traditional generic tendencies. Both were praised, surprisingly, for being innovators as well as for evincing proper femininity. Their visibility in the print media of their own day helped to normalise the concept of female authorship, and urges us to re-examine modern critical understandings of the role that periodicals played in early Romantic norms for gendered writing.

Author(s):  
Gerard Lee McKeever

This introduction clarifies the book’s contribution to the study of Scottish Romanticism, Enlightenment and improvement. Improvement, it argues, was sufficiently important as a modality, trope and environmental condition to be viewed plausibly as a defining feature of literary production in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland. The introduction includes a working genealogy of improvement and a survey of the motley field of scholarship on the topic. A section on the national implications of improvement in the Scottish context is next, followed by more detail on the book’s dialectical approach. There is then an analysis of the category of Scottish Romanticism as it has been treated elsewhere and as it is modified by the book’s own case studies, summaries of which form the final section.


Revue Romane ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213
Author(s):  
Marius Warholm Haugen

Abstract This article studies the discourse in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French periodical press on the topic of translations of travel writing. It reveals that travel reviews were arenas for discussing the political and ideological value of translating travelogues into French, notably from English. In the context of the Franco-British conflicts at the turn of the century, the French press perceived translations of British travel writing as potential patriotic tools that allowed different ways of countering or subverting British global influence. Paratextual elements of translations, the translator’s prefaces and notes, appeared to be particularly important in this respect. By analysing the periodical discourse on travel book translations, the article shows how travel writing was constructed as a politically invested genre.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theo Jung

This article traces the uses of zeitgeist in early nineteenth-century European political discourse. To explain the concept's explosive takeoff in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two perspectives are combined. On the one hand, the concept is shown to be a key element in the new, “temporalized” discourses of cultural reflection emerging during this time. On the other, its pragmatic value as a linguistic tool in concrete political constellations is outlined on the basis of case studies from French, British, and German political discourse. Developing this two-sided perspective, the article sheds light on an important aspect of early nineteenth-century political discourse while also pointing to some general considerations concerning the relationship between the semantic and pragmatic analysis of historical language use.


Author(s):  
Ryu Susato

This chapter deals with the reception of Hume in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. The subject of the contemporary and early nineteenth century receptions of Hume’s writings has already been addressed by James Fieser’s series of Early Responses to Hume. The problematic issue of the relationship between Hume as a philosopher and historian, however, is insufficiently addressed. The lack of a sustained analysis of the relationship between Hume’s philosophy and politics might be the result of the continued influence exerted by John Stuart Mill’s evaluation that Hume’s philosophical scepticism leads him to political conservatism. Through detailed analysis of British pamphlets and periodicals (such as The Edinburgh Review, The Quarterly Review, and The Annual Register) published at the turn of the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that Mill’s evaluation was not widely accepted among the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers and reviewers. Some radicals (Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, the young James Mackintosh) left positive comments regarding Hume’s supposed liberal and anti-religious attitude in his History. Interestingly, some Romantics such as Coleridge suspected that Hume, as ‘infidel’ writer, was responsible for the French Revolution along with the philosophes.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

This chapter shows how contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they used, both stigmatized and popularized the Romantic mad poet. A forensic rhetoric, drawing directly on medical ideas of partial insanity and critical ‘moral management’, was deployed by the periodical press in the first quarter of the nineteenth century—first the quarterlies like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, then later new capricious and aggressive magazines such as Blackwood’s, and more quotidian or staid journals—against all of the major Romantic poets. The chapter shows, moreover, how the polemical terms in which Romantic poets were dismissed also held the seeds of their later canonization. The periodical critics, while they used slurs of meaningless insanity to dismiss poetry for political and reactionary ends, also spread the fame of ‘mad genius’, turning a marginalized opinion on the link between creativity and disorder into a cultural phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).


Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.


2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document