Byron and Antiquity, ‘Et Cetera - ’

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
Anna Camilleri
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Roman Art ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Proper Subject ◽  
Better Than

Byron’s interest in the classical past is manifest throughout his life and work. Alongside citations from and references to a remarkable catalogue of writers, thinkers, and historical figures, we also have extensive poetic responses to classical places, classical architecture, and to Greek and Roman art and sculpture. Yet it is clear that Byron’s classical pretentions are by no means underpinned by a thorough grasp of classical languages. His Greek in particular was extremely poor, and his Latin compositions barely better than the average eighteenth-century schoolboy’s. As I shall go on to demonstrate, this does not mean that attending to those moments when he does stray into classical allusion or composition is uninteresting, but it is Latin and not Greek that Byron engages with most frequently. Specifically, Byron’s less than proper Latin becomes a means by which he negotiates less than proper subject matter in his poetry.

Reflections

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-576
Author(s):  
Laura Engel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual History ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis employ eighteenth-century subject matter, iconography, and media to reimagine the visual history of Black women. Putting Colomba’s and Jean-Louis’s work in dialogue with my own, I return to the premises of my book Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), to re-examine, interrogate, and acknowledge my position as a white scholar.

Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Domestic Culture ◽  
The Way

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book offered a series of vignettes of reading lives and practices. It presented a cluster of historical figures and a range of historical books, and used them to try to reconstruct what literature has meant and what it has been used for. It showed that the way in which people used the books they read are closely bound up with other aspects of amateur, domestic culture. This book also showed that anxieties about forms of reading are not new. Eighteenth-century commentators worried about learning bought too easily and readers who could no longer engage with whole texts. Families encouraged reading together because they feared that young people were losing their sense of reality through their immersion in addictive imaginative fictions. The world of eighteenth-century reading was a very different land, but in some ways, perhaps not so far from our own as we like to think.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Johann Sebastian Bach ◽  
Island Territory

As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them. —Heraclitus Watery metaphors prove irresistible as I reflect on the central subject matter of this volume—Bach. The streams of prose about Johann Sebastian Bach that have emanated from the pens of myriad writers since the eighteenth century have to date coalesced in a sea of Bach scholarship that appears to be ever rising (over 73,000 titles are available in the online “Bach-Bibliographie” maintained by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig), but whose shorelines as yet remain quite firmly delineated. Or, to turn the metaphor around, Bach scholarship on the whole can still seem like a well-fortified island in an ocean of musicological and wider humanities/social sciences discourse that laps up against its shores without any serious risk of getting its inhabitants’ feet too wet. For this island territory, thankfully, existential threats in the form of floods or tsunamis remain a fairly distant prospect. A number of prestigious publication series with those iconic four letters in the title, from the ...

Is There Any Ontology in Aristotle?

Dialogue ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Owens
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Proper Subject

The term “ontology”, as is well enough known, is of seventeenth-century vintage. According to current research, it first appears in the year 1613. By the end of the century it had waxed firm in common recognition. Through the influence of Christian Wolff in the following century, the eighteenth, it quickly became standard in the school tradition for the science of being in general, the science of being qua being. In its morphology the term showed clearly enough that it was meant to designate a science that bore upon being in the widest range of the notion. In that tenor it was described at the time as metaphysica de ente, philosophia de ente, doctrina de ente, or entis scientia, in the sense that “being” denoted its proper subject matter (objectum proprium) more correctly than did “metaphysics”.' Accordingly, it was intended to imply that “being”, tout court, was to be regarded as the object of a philosophical science quite as “soul”, for instance, played the role of object for psychology.

A. J. Davis’s Belmead

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Daniel Bluestone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Agricultural System ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
James River ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Slave Quarters

In 1845 Philip St. George Cocke commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis to design a Gothic revival villa for Belmead. In doing so he radically departed from the tradition of Palladian and classical architecture that had characterized elite Virginia plantations since the mid-eighteenth century. In A. J. Davis’s Belmead: Picturesque Aesthetics in the Land of Slavery, Daniel Bluestone argues that a Davis design resonated differently on the banks of the James River than on the banks of the Hudson. The appeal of Davis’s design lay in its sensitivity to the reciprocity between buildings and landscape, highlighting Cocke’s advocacy of greater stewardship of the land in the place of generations of ruinous agricultural practices. Beyond his villa and his land, Cocke commissioned Davis to design Belmead’s slave quarters. This was an attempt to harmonize himself with his slaves and the nation with an agricultural system based upon chattel slavery rather than yeomen farmers. This essay encourages us to look beyond the universals that often frame architectural history discussions of picturesque aesthetics to situate picturesque designs more precisely within a place-centered context of client vision and socio-cultural meaning.

A Historical Overview of Psychological Inquiry as a Contested Method

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyna Pryiomka ◽  
Joshua Clegg
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Systems ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
History Of ◽  
Proper Subject ◽  
Psychological Inquiry

Like science in general, psychological research has never had a method. Rather, psychologists have deployed many methods under quite variable justifications. The history of these methods is thus a history of contestation. Psychology’s method debates are many and varied, but they mostly constellate around two interconnected concerns: psychology’s status as a science, and psychology’s proper subject matter. On the first question, the majority position has been an attempt to establish psychology as scientific, and thus committed to quantification and to objective, particularly experimental, methods. Challenging this position, many have argued that psychology cannot be a science, or at least not a natural one. Others have questioned the epistemic privilege of operationalization, quantification, experimentation, and even science itself. Connecting epistemic concerns with those of ethics and morality, some have pointed to the dehumanizing and oppressive consequences of objectification. In contrast to the debates over psychology’s status as a science, the question of its proper subject matter has produced no permanent majority position, but perennial methodological debates. Perhaps the oldest of these is the conflict over whether and how self, mind, or consciousness can be observed. This conflict produced famous disagreements like the imageless thought controversy and the behaviorist assault on “introspection.” Other recurrent debates include those over whether psychologists study wholes or aggregates, structures or functions, and states or dynamic systems.

The Disaster Artist of the long eighteenth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
D. J. Moores
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Century Literature

This essay is a discussion of three anonymous novels about happiness from the long eighteenth century – The Vale of Felicity (1791), Benignity (1818) and Edward (1820) – all of which seem to be written by the same author, as they exhibit striking similarities not only in subject matter but also in their aristocratic perspective on happiness, one wholly dependent upon pecuniary means. What is more, they exhibit the same artistic deficiencies, particularly in wooden characters and the rather poor handling of pacing, plotting, obtrusive didacticism and complication. The opening discussion situates the novels in the context of the abundant eighteenth-century literature on happiness, while the body of the essay is a critical analysis of the three narratives in terms of their various genres (epistolary, sentimental, didactic, Bildungsroman, circular journey, identikit, picaresque) and eighteenth-century ideas on Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christian charity. The peroration and conclusion are a reflection upon the notion of happiness itself and how it has been ill-received in literary studies. The essay represents the first analysis of its kind, since there is no extant, substantial criticism on any of these novels.

Historically Speaking,—: Arithmetic problems 175 years ago

1961 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 361-363
Author(s):  
Cecil B. Read
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Mathematics Teaching ◽  
New Developments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Class Room

A commonly encountered criticism of present-day mathematics teaching is that we fail to take account of new developments; it is sometimes said that a mathematician of the seventeenth or eighteenth century could step into the modern class-room and be competent to teach any of the subject matter.

The Development of the Hungarian Military Frontier until the Middle of the Eighteenth Century

1973 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 55-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Wessely
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Border Area ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Military Conscription ◽  
Organizational Features ◽  
Better Than

After a long period of neglect, the Austrian Military Frontiers have once again aroused the interest of historians. This article is based on the assumption that, because of the new interest, the reader will be familiar with the frontiers' basic organizational features. Presumably it is well known that the inhabitants of the border area between the Austrian and Turkish empires were subject to military conscription and that because of their unique role their living conditions were better than those of the Hungarian serfs.

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