scholarly journals Cutting Edges: Professional Hierarchy vs. Creative Identity in Nicolas de Launay’s Fine Art Prints

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Tamara Abramovitch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Successful Career ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Individual Signature ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Print Market

In 1783, Nicolas De Launay copied Les Baignets by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, stating it was made “by his very humble and very obedient servant”, an evidence of the hierarchical tensions between painters and printmakers during the eighteenth-century. However, De Launay’s loyalty is not absolute, since a critical artistic statement is found at the edge: an illusory oval frame heavily adorned with leaves and fruits of Squash, Hazelnuts, and Oak. This paper wishes to acknowledge this meticulously engraved frame, and many more added to copies throughout De Launay’s successful career, as highly relevant in examining his ‘obedience’ and ‘humbleness’. With regard to eighteenth-century writings on botany and authenticity, and to current studies on the print market, I offer a new perspective in which engravers are appreciated as active commercial artists establishing an individual signature style. In their conceptual and physical marginality these decorations allow creative freedom which challenges concepts of art appropriation and reproduction, highly relevant then and today.

Characters Before Copyright

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Consumer Habits ◽  
Archival Work

How did authors control the literary fates of fictional characters before the existence of copyright? Could a second author do anything with another author’s character? Situated between the decline of the privilege system and the rise of copyright, literary borrowing in eighteenth-century Germany has long been considered unregulated. This book tells a different story. Characters before Copyright documents the surprisingly widespread eighteenth-century practice of writing fan fiction—literary works written by readers who appropriate preexisting characters invented by other authors—and reconstructs the contemporaneous debate about the literary phenomenon. Like fan fiction today, these texts took the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. Analyzing the evolving reading, writing, and consumer habits of late-eighteenth-century Germany, Characters before Copyright identifies the social, economic, and aesthetic changes that fostered the rapid rise of fan fiction after 1750. Based on archival work and an ethnographic approach borrowed from legal anthropology, this book then uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production of these works. Characters before Copyright thus reinterprets the eighteenth-century “literary commons,” arguing that what may appear to have been the free circulation of characters was actually circumscribed by an exacting set of rules and conditions. These norms translated into a unique type of literature that gave rise to remarkable forms of collaborative authorship and originality. Characters before Copyright provides a new perspective on the eighteenth-century book trade and the rise of intellectual property, reevaluating the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.

Naming the West

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerdien Jonker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
European Values ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Civilized World ◽  
Made In

This article discusses the relationship between Europe and ancient Greece as narrated (or ignored) in a range of European history textbooks. It unravels the threads the narrative has followed since the eighteenth century, investigating the choices made in construing the narrative taught today. Which meanings were inherent in the terms “east” and “west” before they acquired the ideological coloring associating “east” with “barbarians” and “west” with the civilized world and “Europe”? The article opens up a new perspective on a complex past that was lost from view when perceptions of the ancient Greeks as guarantors of European values became entwined with the invention of the nation state.

4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Approaches To Literature ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies ◽  
New Perspective

The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels real because it is integrated into the lifeworld and its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.

Limits to Despotism: Idealizations of Chinese Governance and Legitimizations of Absolutist Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Fiscal Reforms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Joseph Ii

Abstract The term “oriental despotism” was used to describe all larger Asian empires in eighteenth century Europe. It was meaningful to use about the Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese empires. However, this did not mean that all Europeans writing on Asian empires implied that they were all tyrannies with no political qualities. The Chinese system of government received great interest among early modern political thinkers in Europe ever since it was described in the reports that Jesuit missionaries had sent back from China in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The descriptions of an ethical and political bond between emperor and administrators in China and of specific administrative organs in which age-old principles were managed made a great impression on many European readers of these reports. Although it did not remain an undisputed belief in Europe, many intellectuals held China to be a model of how the power of a sovereign could be limited or curbed within an absolutist system of government. This article investigates three cases of how the models of China were conceived by theorists reading Jesuit reports and how they subsequently strategically communicated this model to the courts of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. These three ambitious European monarchies have been regarded to give rise to a form of “enlightened absolutism” that formed a tradition different from those of England and France, the states whose administrative systems formed the most powerful models in this period. Rather than describing the early modern theories about China’s despotism as a narrative parallel, but unrelated to the development of policy programs of the respective states, this article documents how certain elements of the model of China were integrated in the political writings of Frederick II of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and Catherine II of Russia. Thus, in addition to the history of political thought on China, the article adds a new perspective to how these monarchs argued for fiscal reforms and a centralization and professionalization of their administrations.

The Prince's Mentor: A New Perspective on the Friendship between George III and Lord Bute during the 1750s

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Bullion
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
George Iii ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

The effects of the intense personal and political relationship between the young George III and his “dearest friend,” the earl of Bute, are well known to scholars of eighteenth-century Britain. The prince's affection and respect raised Bute, an obscure though well-connected Scottish nobleman, to the highest offices of state and to the absolute pinnacle of power. The earl's instruction and advice governed George's reactions to men and measures from 1755 until 1763. Even after Bute's influence waned following his resignation as First Lord of the Treasury, the lingering suspicions at Whitehall and Westminster that the king still listened to him in preference to others complicated relations between George III, his ministers, and Parliament.This article examines the origins of the friendship between the king and the earl, and the features of it that strengthened and preserved their attachment during the 1750s. These are questions that have not engaged the attention of many students of the period. The long shadow the relationship cast over politics during the 1760s has intrigued far more historians than its beginnings. They have been content to leave efforts to understand that subject to Sir Lewis Namier, who was inclined toward making psychological judgments of eighteenth-century politicians, and John Brooke, who was compelled to do so by the demands of writing a biography of George III. Both of these men asserted that the personal and affectionate aspects of the connection between the prince and Bute far outweighed the political and ideological during its early years. Their arguments have evidently convinced historians of politics to pass over what made Bute “my dearest friend” and press on to matters they assumed to be more relevant to their interests. The concern of this essay is to demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. It will show that political and ideological considerations were in fact utterly crucial to this friendship at its inception and throughout its development during the 1750s, with consequences which profoundly affected the political history of the first decade of George III's reign. A mistaken reliance on works by Namier and Brooke has prevented scholars from perceiving these realities. Thus it is necessary to begin by pointing out the serious flaws in their interpretations.

New Perspectives on Manila’s Chinese Community at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-146
Author(s):  
Edward R. Slack (史义华)
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Chinese Overseas ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Conventional Paradigm

Abstract This article reexamines the political dynamic within Manila’s Parián (Chinatown) in the early eighteenth century, challenging the “conventional” paradigm of Christian Chinese monopolization of power. The centerpiece of my research focuses on a judicial case initiated by the Chinese community against Pedro Barredo, a Spanish official charged with committing a variety of sadistic crimes against Chinese merchants and their families in 1701. It also analyzes the psychological rationale undergirding Spain’s systemic racism against Chinese immigrants responsible for the colony’s economic prosperity. Utilizing unpublished documents from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, and the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila, this new perspective fills in significant details missing from scholarly literature regarding the Chinese Overseas experience in Manila prior to 1800.

Hegel's Concept of the Familiar: Toward a Philosophical Study

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Hammam Aldouri
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Multiple Processes ◽  
Lecture Notes ◽  
First Moment

Abstract One of the most memorable lines of Hegel's oeuvre is from the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood.’ Surprisingly, relatively little philosophical attention has been paid to the notion of ‘the familiar’ in Hegel scholarship. This essay aims to rectify this lack by offering a preliminary inquiry in what the notion means across Hegel's work. It does so by focusing on three underexplored moments in Hegel's work: (1) the exposition of the logic of appearance in the description and diagnosis of seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch painting in the lecture notes from the 1823 Berlin lectures on the philosophy of fine art; (2) the function of institutionalized practice in Hegel's Tübingen essay of 1793; and (3) the conjunctural relation of the familiar with philosophical terminology in an entry from the ‘Aphorisms from the Wastebook.’ Through a careful reading of these three moments, I will show that the familiar is a point that constellates multiple processes, mechanisms and apparatuses that, when grasped in their complex totality, functions as the ‘prius’ (priority/prioritization/first moment) of Hegel's speculative philosophy.

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