Suitable Reading Material: Fandom and Female Pleasure in Women’s Engagement with Romantic Periodicals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Hayles Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
Reading Material ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Textual Communities

Romantic women’s magazines were part of a broad cultural moment that saw a rapid expansion in the presence and accessibility of genre fiction, which easily attached feminine associations to the critical imaginary. Evan Hayles Gledhill’s essay analyses women readers’ investment in reading and authoring Gothic and romantic fictions for late eighteenth-century periodicals, such as the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828) and the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), to reveal how this fiction disrupted the traditional and gendered value systems that dominated Romantic publishing. In the process, Gledhill uncovers striking similarities between the textual communities that produced, or emerged in response to, this fiction and modern textual fan communities.

‘[T]o cherish Female ingenuity, and to conduce to Female improvement’: The Birth of the Woman’s Magazine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie Batchelor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Periodical Studies ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Major Study ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Women's Magazine ◽  
Poor Relation

Despite the much-documented rise of periodical studies, no major study of the late eighteenth-century women’s magazine exists. Those who have devoted specific attention to the form, either as an epilogue to studies of the essay periodical or as a prelude to the Victorian women’s magazine, commonly misrepresent it. In this chapter, Jennie Batchelor interrogates these oversights and distortions and offers a reassessment the women’s magazine in relation to the periodical genres in whose company the magazine is often considered a poor relation. The chapter proceeds with an extended consideration of one of the women’s magazine’s earliest and most influential examples – the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) in relation to earlier ladies’ magazines and periodical forerunners such as Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1). Revealing the multiple ways in which the magazine demonstrated its commitment to women’s education, Batchelor challenges accounts that have seen eighteenth-century women’s magazines as the beginning of the end for their female readers and that have erroneously associated the genre with a uniformly and oppressively conservative gender ideology.

Problems in Alcoholic Production and Controls in Early Nineteenth Century Ireland

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-302
Author(s):  
Robert Shipkey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Alcoholic Beverages ◽  
Scale Production ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale Production ◽  
Irish Government

From the time of Henry Grattan's pronouncement of 1791 that ‘the drinking of spirits’ had become ‘a great national evil’ to the conclusion of the Poor Law Report of 1837 that an Irishman could get ‘dead drunk for two pence', the problems of alcoholic production, consumption and controls plagued the Irish Government. In a country whose food supplies were often as precarious as its revenues, the brewing of beer and the distilling of spirits were enterprises as controversial as they were profitable. These industries, newly adapted to the large-scale production of the late eighteenth century, underwent rapid expansion during the first years of the Union despite restrictive taxation, periodic measures of prohibition and the persistent harping of temperance leaders. During this period Ireland became an exporter rather than an importer of alcoholic beverages and witnessed the development of a considerable number of licensed breweries and distilleries throughout the country.

Democratizing Abolitionism: Anti-slavery Discourses and Sentiments in August von Kotzebue's Die Negersklaven (1796)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
German States ◽  
Political Sources ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Peripheral Position ◽  
Histoire Des Deux Indes ◽  
Political Leverage

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.

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