scholarly journals Scotland, Britain, Europe: Parallels with Eighteenth-century Political Debate

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
Rhona Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
First Century ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Press ◽  
Unusual Phenomenon ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
Political Divide

This article focuses on the controversial eighteenth-century Whig politician, John Wilkes (1725–97), his journalism and his reception in the Scottish periodical press, while considering parallels with current debates on Brexit and Scottish independence. Wilkes, seen by some at the time as a notorious rabble-rouser and a voracious Scotophobe, was nevertheless elected democratically (an unusual phenomenon at this time) to various political offices while campaigning for the freedom of the press. His outspoken attacks on the Scottish Prime Minister, Lord Bute, and associated insults to Scotland, prompted an angry response in the Scottish press and magnified the political divide between Scotland and England. If Wilkes represented ‘liberty’ to many English Whigs, he symbolised outspoken prejudice to many in Scotland. The article will examine some of Wilkes's own pronouncements on the Scots in his North Briton magazine, alongside responses in the contemporary Scottish periodical press. The debates that Wilkes focuses on – Scotland's so-called ‘rebellious’ nature and its unhelpful attachment to continental Europe – resonate with twenty-first-century political debates in illuminating ways.

scholarly journals Newspaper Debates in Late Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Letters to the Editor’ versus the Political Pamphlet

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanne Slettvoll Kristiansen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

When exploring contributions to political debates in late eighteenth-century England, scholars have typically favoured non-serialized publications, most commonly the pamphlet, thus neglecting the many contributions appearing in the periodical press. This article redresses this oversight by exploring both the shortcomings and the advantages of the newspaper as a medium for political debate in this period. Based on a close reading of leading London newspapers from the politically turbulent years of 1791–95, this article explores the following questions: What advantages did the newspaper have over stand-alone publications such as the political pamphlet? What type of audience were writers of political newspaper commentary trying to reach, and what barriers did they encounter when attempting to do so? Why did the newspaper supplant the non-serialized pamphlet as the leading medium for political debate towards the end of the eighteenth century?

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 485-488
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles Kingsley ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Social Reforms ◽  
Women Journalists ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Political Realm

IN 1869, CHARLES KINGSLEY wrote a review of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women for Macmillan’s Magazine, praising its message about women’s fitness for participation in the political realm. He notes, ‘What women have done for the social reforms of the last forty years is known, or ought to be known, to all…. Who will say that Mrs Fry, or Miss Nightingale, or Miss Burdett Coutts, is not as fit to demand pledges of a candidate and the hustings on important social questions as any male elector?’ (Oct 1869: 558). In this way, he provided support for Mill’s argument in favour of women’s enfranchisement while at the same drawing attention to their ongoing influence in discussions of social and political questions – as recounted in and facilitated by the periodical press. Indeed, by 1869 women had been contributing to political discourse for many years, due largely to the convention of anonymity in most periodicals and newspapers. Hidden behind the ‘editorial we,’ women journalists did not have to write from gendered subject positions. The rapid expansion of the press during the same period, facilitated by advances in printing technology and reductions in the taxes on print, provided women with increased opportunities to enter the profession and contribute to political debates....

scholarly journals The Racialization of Gratitude in Victorian Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-491
Author(s):  
Robert Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Press Reaction ◽  
West African ◽  
First Century ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The Press ◽  
White Hegemony

Abstract Gratitude was racialized in Victorian culture. Drawing on a wide historical framework, which takes in eighteenth-century proslavery arguments as well as twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourses, I explore how Victorian-era texts placed demands upon enslaved, formerly enslaved, and colonized peoples to feel thankful for their treatment as British imperial subjects. My article ranges over contexts and academic debates, and surveys nineteenth-century discourses, but it coheres around a case study concerning media reportage of the brief residence of a young West African, Eyo Ekpenyon Eyo II, in Colwyn Bay, Wales, in 1893. In a contextual examination of the press reaction to Eyo’s decision to abandon his British schooling, this article draws attention to the implicit, submerged inequalities, exemplified in the demand for gratitude, through which Victorian Britain articulated the affective qualities of white hegemony.

Speech Acts by the Governor Candidates of North Sumatera in Political Debates

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vidya Dwi Amalia Zati ◽  
Sumarsih Sumarsih ◽  
Lince Sihombing
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Dominant Type ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Way ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

The objectives of the research were to describe the types of speech acts used in televised political debates of governor candidates of North Sumatera, to derive the dominant type of speech acts used in televised political debates of governor candidates of North Sumatera and to elaborate the way of five governor candidates of North Sumatera use speech acts in televised political debates. This research was conducted by applying descriptive qualitative research. The findings show that there were only four types of speech acts used in televised political debates, Debat Pemilukada Sumatera Utara and Uji Publik Cagub dan Cawagub Sumatera Utara, they were assertives, directives, commissives and expressives. The dominant type of speech acts used in both televised political debates was assertives, with 82 utterances or 51.6% in Debat Pemilukada Sumatera Utara and 36 utterances or 41.37% in Uji Publik Cagub dan Cawagub Sumatera Utara. The way of governor candidates of North Sumatera used speech acts in televised political debates is in direct speech acts, they spoke straight to the point and clearly in order to make the other candidates and audiences understand their utterances.   Keywords: Governor Candidate; Political Debate; Speech Acts

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

‘Tales of Wonder and Horror’: Coverage of insanity in the Leeds press, 1808-1840

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Evgeniya Kryssova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The Body ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Periodical Literature ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
The North ◽  
The Press

<p>The press was at the centre of the reform of the meaning of insanity, during its evolution from an equivocal eighteenth-century concept of melancholia to a medicalised Victorian notion of ‘lunacy’. During the late Georgian era newspapers provided a public forum for the opinion of newly emerging psychiatric practitioners and fostered the fears and concerns about mental illness and its supposed increase. The press was also the main source of news on crime, providing readers with reports on criminal insanity and suicide. In the first half of the nineteenth century, newspaper contents included official legal reports, as well as editorial commentary and excerpts from other publications, and newspaper articles can rarely be traced to one single author. Historians of British insanity avoid consulting periodical literature, choosing to use asylum records and coroners’ reports, as these sources are more straightforward than newspapers. However, Rab Houston’s recent study of the coverage of suicide in the north of Britain shows that the provincial press has been unjustly overlooked and can offer the material for a unique social analysis. Asylum records and coroners’ records do not contain the same detail provided in the press. Newspaper commentary can arguably reveal contemporary attitudes towards insanity and, moreover, sources such as asylum records only deal with the lower-class patients, as the middle- and upper-class insane were usually privately detained.  This thesis examines the press coverage of insanity in Leeds newspapers, and expands on previous research by looking at the way insanity was portrayed in the two most popular publications in the industrial region of Yorkshire: the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury. Chapter one focuses on legal cases that featured a verdict of insanity and explores the language used by the press in the reports of, mainly, violent domestic crime. Chapter two looks at reports of suicide and considers how contemporary views on financial and moral despondency influenced the portrayal of self-murder. Chapter three considers editorial articles that cannot be described as either crime or suicide reports. This chapter uncovers the presence of surprisingly humorous and entertaining articles on insanity found in editorials and the ‘Miscellany’ sections of the newspapers. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the reportage of insanity in the Leeds press was sensational, moralistic and selectively sympathetic; furthermore, such portrayal of insanity was reinforced throughout the body of the paper. Leeds newspapers segregated the insane by adopting a moralising tone and by choosing to use class-specific language towards the insane of different social ranks.</p>

A Dark Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke N. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Slave System ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
The Relationship

Focusing on Jamaica, Britain’s most valuable colony in the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century, A Dark Inheritance explores the relationship between racial classifications and the inherited rights and privileges associated with British subject status. Brooke Newman reveals the centrality of notions of blood and blood mixture to evolving racial definitions and sexual practices in colonial Jamaica and to legal and political debates over slavery and the rights of imperial subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. Weaving together a diverse range of sources, Newman shows how colonial racial ideologies rooted in fictions of blood ancestry at once justified permanent, hereditary slavery for Africans and barred members of certain marginalized groups from laying claim to British liberties on the basis of hereditary status. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that challenges to an Atlantic slave system underpinned by distinctions of blood had far-reaching consequences for British understandings of race, gender, and national belonging.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document