‘Soothing Thoughts’

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-128
Author(s):  
Brittany Pladek
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Natural Medicine ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Healing Power ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Lyrical Ballads ◽  
Romantic Medicine ◽  
Holistic Therapy

Chapter three begins the book’s survey of palliative poetics developed by Romantic writers, comparing Wordsworth’s ideas about poetic therapy with medical beliefs of the late eighteenth century. The therapeutic holism later ascribed to Wordsworth by literary critics was held by Romantic medicine to be a restorative power of nature, a ‘vis medicatrix naturae’ that could repair a broken constitution in ways doctors could not. But as medicine professionalized, they saw how claims that nature was the real healer could damage their reputation. Their compensatory shift to a palliative ethic was driven in part by a need to renegotiate medicine’s relationship with nature. Similarly, Wordsworth initially hoped his own poetry could replicate nature’s holistic therapy. But in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection whose Wordsworthian lyrics extol the superiority of natural medicine, Wordsworth realized his own art could not mimic nature’s healing power. As a result, he turns towards a poetics of palliation grounded in the ‘delight’ outlined by Edmund Burke’s 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Literary motifs, musical form and the quest for the ‘Sublime’: Cherubini'sEliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard

1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Central Location ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
At Home

A common feature of Cherubini's Parisian operas of the 1790s is the displacement of one or more of the protagonists. They are out of sorts with their environment, experiencing a need to escape that prevents the traditional unity of place from focusing the drama. The heroine ofLodoïska(1791)isimprisoned in a tower; inEliza ou le Voyage aux glaciers du Mont St BernardFlorindo travels to Mont St Bernard to forget his beloved Eliza, who pursues him and saves him from suicide. For the heroine ofMédée(1797), Corinth represents unhappiness: she returns to her former home only to take revenge. InLes deux Journées(1800), Armand and Constance flee Paris to save their lives; even in the comic operaL'Hôtellerie portugaise(1798) the central location serves merely as a rendez-vous for the two lovers on their way to evade the wicked plans of Donna Gabriele's stepfather. These operas do not, in other words, unfold in reassuring environments where characters feel at home; nor are there neutral backgrounds that enable the drama to concentrate on personal interaction. What is more, although placing protagonists in such unhappy circumstances is widespread in late eighteenth-century opera, and ‘rescue operas’ in particular, it is at least arguable that Cherubini exploited their restlessness in a uniquely successful manner.

Between the Virtual and the Actual: Robert Barker's Panorama of London and the Multiplication of the Real in late eighteenth-century London1

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Otto
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trompe L'oeil ◽  
The Real ◽  
Single View ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Or Practice

Abstract The panorama is usually identified as the culmination, for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, of Enlightenment attempts to produce a “second-order reality in which to play with or practice upon the first order”. It is therefore aligned with the modern attempt to contain everything within a single view or picture. In contrast, this paper argues that in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century the panorama and the hyper-realistic illusions it conjured, paradoxically relied on and at the same time intensified the late eighteenth-century sense that first and second order realities (the “physical environment in which one is really present” and the environments presented by material or textual media) had diverged to a degree that was unprecedented. This at first somewhat counter-intuitive phenomenon occurs not despite but because of the panorama’s ability to simulate the real. The hyper-realistic virtual realities of the early panorama intensified late eighteenth-century interest in the observation of observation; presented perception as an event that did not require the presence of its apparent object, thus radicalising the achievements of Trompe l’Oeil painting; drew attention to the figural space of representation; and provided new evidence for the constructed and contingent nature of the real. The paper takes as its key foci Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above a sea of Mists” (1818), the Leicester Square Panorama (opened 1793), and Barker’s panorama of London (1791 and 1795).

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT INFLUENCE: ASSESSING EDMUND BURKE'S CONSERVATIVE LEGACIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
CLAIRE RYDELL ARCENAS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Open Question ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.

Art and Archaeology

2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-277
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Worth Reading ◽  
Heroic Narrative ◽  
Alternative Theories

It is an obvious strategy of revisionism, in Classical archaeology: to see what J. J. Winckelmann said about this or that object, or sort of object, and then to measure ‘how far we have come’, in terms of interpretative enlightenment since the late eighteenth century. With the great Nilotic mosaic of Palestrina, that strategy looks at first sight promising enough. Winckelmann's theory was that it must represent a heroic narrative – specifically, the curious variant of Helen's abduction in which Paris carries off merely an eidolon, while the real Helen is secreted by the gods to Egypt and eventually retrieved from there by Menelaus (for details of the story, see Euripides’ Helen). Winckelmann proposed Menelaus to be the foreground figure in greenish armour holding up a drinking-horn, Helen the lady attendant with a ladle – but there was little else to support his reading, and so alternative theories have multiplied (naturally enough – since the date of the mosaic is not absolutely established). In this case, however, it seems we are still short of a satisfactory resolution. By including discussion of the mosaic in her survey of Egypt in Italy, Molly Swetnam-Burland admits that it could as easily post- as pre-date Rome's annexation of the Ptolemaic kingdom; and yet she does not want it to be generically categorized as a sample of nilotica. ‘Representations of Egypt were rarely if ever to be considered in isolation’ (154). This could be the motto of her study, which explores how objects and ideas from and about Egypt became ‘recontextualized’ by the Romans. We may not have a definitive account for the Palestrina mosaic, but overall the results of this approach are worth reading. Analysis of the process whereby the first two obelisks were brought from Egypt to Rome, for example, demands that we do not content ourselves with seeing these transplanted megaliths as simply the trophies of Aegypto capta, nor just signs of Rome's attempt to rival Alexandria, but part of a claim by Augustus to pharaonic/cosmic powers. The author does not confine herself to archaeology: a substantial section of the book is devoted to an analysis of Juvenal's Satire 15.

Sources in Lima for the Study of the Colonial Consulado of Peru

1977 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Substantial Portion ◽  
The Real ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Index

When the old Palacio de Gobierno was demolished in 1938, a mass of papers and volumes were discovered and saved. They turned out to be the heart of the colonial archive of the Lima Tribunal of the Consulado (or Merchant’s Guild) and represented a substantial portion of the colonial Hacienda, or treasury, papers of Lima as well. An archive, the Archivo Histórico de Comercio y Hacienda, was created (and opened in 1944) for the express purpose of housing these documents and its first director, Frederico Schwab, was entrusted with the organization and cataloguing of this valuable collection. Schwab and Luis Felipe Muro Arias’ Catàlogo de la Sección Colonial del Archivo Histórico del Ministerio de Hacienda was published in Lima in 1944 and listed all of the major documentation held by the new archive relative to the colonial affairs of the Consulado and the Real Hacienda. A few years later Robert Sidney Smith, another scholar to reach and work this rich depisitory in its early years, transcribed the original index to the archive created by the Consulado to house its papers in the late eighteenth century. This work, El Indice del Archivo del Tribunal del Consulado de Lima, appeared in 1948 with an excellent preface to the history of the collection by Schwab and a valuable introduction to the Lima Consulado prepared by Smith himself. Since then, scholars such as the Peruvian Manuel Moreyra y Paz-Soldan and the Frenchwoman Marie Helmer have been able to take advantage of this great collection because of the pioneering work of Schwab, Smith, and their colleagues. The archive has since lost its autonomy and is now incorporated into the Archivo Nacional, which was a logical step in centralization since both archives are located in the Palacio de Justicia in Lima.

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