scholarly journals Walking with John Howard: Itineracy and Romantic Reform

Romanticism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
Gabriel Cervantes ◽  
Dahlia Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Common Humanity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Humanitarian Mission ◽  
John Howard ◽  
Global Reach

This essay identifies a new source for the politicization of walking in the final decades of the eighteenth century, John Howard's The State of the Prisons (1777). Howard made a case for reforming prisons in Britain and across Europe based on evidence collected on his wide-ranging travels, during which he made a practice of stepping into spaces of incarceration where others – including jailors themselves – refused to tread. As we show, Howard was celebrated for the seemingly global reach of his humanitarian mission, but in the work of poets and biographers he also became an icon for the levelling potential of walking into spaces occupied by the legally, socially and economically disenfranchised. Howard's text, however, presents a tension between asserting common humanity with prisoners and exercising patrician benevolence. As we show in conclusion, this tension persists in early nineteenth-century literary representations of both prison reform and walking by Wordsworth and De Quincey, whose texts trouble the (by then established) assumption that walking constituted a politically radical act of social levelling.

scholarly journals Afterlives of the Republic of Letters: Learned Journals and Scholarly Community in the Early Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Changing Role

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.

scholarly journals Iceland in the Eighteenth Century: An Island Outpost of Europe?

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Agnarsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
European Continent ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Enlightenment

The aim is to define Iceland’s relationship with Europe during the eighteenth century. Though Iceland, an island in the mid-Atlantic, was geographically isolated from the European continent, it was in most respects an integral part of Europe. Iceland was not much different from western Europe except for the notable lack of towns and a European-style nobility. However, there was a clearly – defined elite and by the end of the eighteenth century urbanisation had become government policy. Iceland was also remote in the sense that the state of knowledge among the Europeans was slight and unreliable. However, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, Danish and French expeditions were sent to Iceland while British scientists began exploring the island with the result that by the early nineteenth century an excellent choice of books was available in the major European languages giving up-to-date accounts of Iceland. On the other hand the Icelanders were growing ever closer to Europe, by the end of the century for instance adopting fashionable European dress. Iceland’s history always followed western trends, its history more or less mirroring that of western Europe.

Venues

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-223
Author(s):  
Rogério Budasz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
The State ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

This chapter considers the emergence of theatrical spaces in the main captaincies of Portuguese America. The first part examines the typology of such constructions (tablados, pátios de comédias, and casas da ópera) and explores the role played by the accelerated urbanization of the colony and the inconsistent application of enlightened policies in the second half of the eighteenth century. The second part examines the most important constructions, considering the individuals, processes, and ideologies that determined their creation, with an emphasis on the alleged function of the theater as a school of customs. It also argues that a number of theaters in Belém, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Ouro Preto were conceived, and for a period of time even managed, as extensions of the state politico-ideological apparatus. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the early-nineteenth-century concept of theater as monument, a place of overlap between the civic and political spheres.

scholarly journals Smoking Clubs in Graphic Satire and the Anglicizing of Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
Graphic Satire ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Cultural Connotations

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).

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.

Romantic Heroes and Colonial Bandits

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
British Colonial

This chapter argues that British literary representations of Indian practices (such as banditry) criminalized by the colonial state had the effect of transforming the eighteenth-century stereotype of the ‘mild Hindoo’ into a predatory Indian masculinity formed in opposition to a weak and victimized femininity. It presents an analysis of a series of representations of India developed through the appropriation of British metropolitan forms and texts, in which the potential for threat to the British colonial state implicit in depictions of Indian agency is disabled or negated by the distancing or alienation of Indian figures from British readers. The chapter examines British Indian adaptations of the most important of these nineteenth-century metropolitan models – the works of Byron and Scott – and the ways in which their depiction of the criminal bandit / hero is appropriated and transformed in the Indian context.

The State

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-152
Author(s):  
Paul Stock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Definitive Form

Chapter 6 discusses late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography books’ sustained focus on the political states of Europe. The books present states both as organic communities with multi-faceted jurisdictions, and as increasingly centralized governmental authorities. They usually specify that monarchy is the definitive form of European government, and that European states share a propensity for ‘liberty’, broadly defined as respect for law and property, and the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. Some geographical texts talk about ‘nations’, but ideas about European polities remain reliant on established notions of governmental structures.

Air and Odour

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-87
Author(s):  
William Tullett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Medicine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
Royal Institution ◽  
Airborne Disease ◽  
The Relationship

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.

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