The Idea of the Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Michael Bell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Sentiment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

Lawrence spoke readily of art and its relation to life but was suspicious of the word ‘aesthetic’, which had been inflected by the aestheticism of the preceding generation. It is nonetheless a necessary term which his thought and practice help to clarify. The idea of the aesthetic has been controversial since its emergence in the late eighteenth century partly in response to the movement of moral sentiment and the fashion of sensibility. Rather than simply reject the excesses of sensibility, the aesthetic condition sought to transmute the quality of the emotion, turning feeling into impersonal understanding. But the cultural war over the value of feeling continued into the modernist generation who sometimes identified as ‘classical’ or ‘romantic’ in their view of emotion. Lawrence mocked such ‘classiosity’ as fear of feeling. This chapter compares him with his major contemporaries and suggests his significance within a broader history of thinking on the aesthetic.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Anthology of Goethe Songs

10.31022/n023 ◽  
1994 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Ferruccio Busoni ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
German Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Voice And Piano

Few poets have had so profound an influence on the history of German art music as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since the late eighteenth century, over seven hundred of his poems have been set by nearly six hundred composers as lieder for voice and piano. This anthology gathers twenty-two such settings, in a wide variety of styles, by composers ranging from Goethe's friend Carl Zelter to Hans von Bülow, Ferruccio Busoni, and Othmar Schoeck.

TWO HUNTERS, A MILKMAID AND THE FRENCH ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ CANON

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA DOE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Stage I ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Printed Music

ABSTRACTLarge-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century:Les deux chasseurs et la laitière(1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history ofLes deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, likeLes deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany

2019 ◽  
pp. 210-226
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of

This chapter explains the remarkable popularity of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter AD 1697 (1703). It argues that Maundrell’s eye-witness reportage of his travels in the Holy Land provided the book’s readers with a storehouse of geographical observations and descriptions of eastern customs with which they could recreate imaginatively the world of the Scriptures. Tracing the book’s use by editors, commentators, translators, and paraphrasts, it argues that Maundrell was most often put to work in defence of the Bible against attacks on its claims to truth. Yet in the hands of Maundrell’s late eighteenth-century German translator, the naturalist and historicist tendencies inherent in his account were brought into sharper focus; ‘sacred geography’ was transformed into a history of biblical culture.

5. Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Waves ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Long Wave ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on the history of democratization since the late eighteenth century. It introduces the concepts of ‘waves’ (trends) and ‘conjunctures’ (briefer turmoils) and delineates the major developments in this respect. In this way, the major long-term and short-term factors leading to the emergence and breakdowns of democracies are also highlighted. The first long wave occurred during the period 1776–1914, followed by the first positive conjuncture in 1918–19, the second long wave (with some intermittent turbulences) in 1945–88, and the latest conjuncture in 1989–90. The chapter identifies the main ingredients to democratization throughout history, namely: republicanism, representation, and political equality. It concludes by considering some of the current perspectives and dangers for the future of democracy.

The Estuary

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kingsbury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Economic ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Rule ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Outcome

A history of environmental, economic, and social change in the Meghna estuary from the late eighteenth century to the 1870s. A new frontier of alluvial land was being created along the edge of the Bay of Bengal, presenting opportunities for profit as well as great risks. The settlement of this frontier was not simply a natural outcome of the availability of new land: it was also encouraged by imperial policy. And just as British rule was not a product of nature, neither were the divisions within Bengali society that helped to determine who would be exposed to disaster.

Sierra Leone

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho ◽  
H. Sabrina Gledhill
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colony ◽  
History Of

After being captured by the Royal Navy brig Water Witch, the Ermelinda is taken to Sierra Leone, a British colony, the history of which is narrated from its foundation by philanthroposts, including the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp, in the late eighteenth century up until Rufino landed there in December 1841. British cruisers deposited scores of liberated Africans there40,000 in the 1830s alone. As a result, Sierra Leone’s population included people of different faiths and ethnicities from all over the western coast of Africa and Mozambique. Anti–slave trade Mixed Commissions were installed in Freetown, where the trial of the Ermelinda was carried out for two months.

Anglo-Irish constitutional relations in the later eighteenth century

1964 ◽  
Vol 14 (53) ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
J.C. Beckett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
British History ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Basic Theme ◽  
History Of ◽  
George Iii

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.

Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the ‘Aesthetic Force’ of Music

2002 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Riley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Aesthetic

Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) exerted considerable influence on late eighteenth-century German musical writers. But for many modern commentators, it typifies the negative attitude to instrumental music characteristic of much Enlightenment rationalism. A reassessment of Sulzer, taking account of his philosophical background in Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten, shows that in fact he considered music the first of the fine arts. The arts have an ethical, civilizing role; but while most can affect only people who are already partly civilized, music possesses a special ‘aesthetic force’ which energizes the minds of cognitively passive people or ‘savages’.

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