‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings’

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Tegan
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Women's Novels ◽  
The Temple

Eighteenth-century critics commonly used birth topoi to ridicule writing they believed to be uninspired or imitative, but their attacks on the bad form and excesses of women’s novels were particularly pointed. Novels were not so much authored as begotten—through suspect feminized spaces like the circulating library and the automatic reproduction of formulaic fiction. Such judgments were felt keenly by women writers, as evidenced by Frances Burney’s anxiety about the fate of her second offspring, Cecilia, and her prefatory allegory of authorial corruption at the Temple of Vanity. Vanity, it was suggested, was not only the motivating force behind women novelists’ endeavors, it might also be fostered through the reading of sentimental fiction. This essay explores the transmission of affect between women readers and writers, reframing the creative and destabilizing powers of vanity to argue that copious nothings divert readers and writers’ attention from domestic cares, disrupting the projections of masculine prerogative.

scholarly journals Dangers, Delights, Development: Female Travel in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Turkish Embassy Letters

Spectrum ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Stanski
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mysteries Of Udolpho

This paper examines the portrayal of travel for women in two eighteenth-century literary texts by women writers: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. With a focus on the mental, emotional, and psychological effects of female travel that each author depicts, it analyzes both the dramatic dangers and pleasures faced by Radcliffe’s Gothic heroine and the more mild, cerebral ones experienced by the historical Montagu. Drawing on the work of Marianna D’Ezio, Adam Watkins, and Mary Jo Kietzman, it argues that both Radcliffe and Montagu ultimately endorsed the idea of travel for women through their work, portraying the pleasure, experience, and self-cultivation it afforded as outweighing its dangers. Finally, it posits that this position resisted both Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of appropriate female behaviours and desires by encouraging women readers to experience the world outside of the domestic sphere.

Art and Archaeology

2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Attractive Feature ◽  
Personal View ◽  
Subsistence Economy ◽  
Islamic School ◽  
The People ◽  
Annales School ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Of Greece

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.

Archaeological Discoveries in Sicily and Magna Graecia

1939 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Umberto Zanotti-Bianco
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
The South ◽  
Total Length ◽  
Magna Graecia ◽  
South West ◽  
Southern Side ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Southern Flank

In my previous report (JHS, 1938, p. 247) I spoke of the work being carried on at Syracuse to bring to light the remains of the temple of Apollo. The east, north, and west sides had been freed by then, whilst the southern side was still hidden under seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses, so that it had never been possible to dig trial trenches through their foundations to ascertain if any part of the temple was preserved there. The demolition of the houses and the excavation under the modern ground level beginning from the south-west angle have fully satisfied our hopes. Five columns of the southern flank of the peristasis have appeared, preserved to a height of over 2 metres, with the stylobate beneath them (Fig. 1): only the angle column had been destroyed during the building of the walls of the Spanish barracks. The cella is equally well preserved, and a third of its total length has already been liberated, although the work is in temporary suspense owing to unsettled disputes with the owners of the houses. The southern flank of the archaic Syracusan temple appears to be in much better condition than the others.

The gender politics of ‘bluestocking philosophy’

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Ann Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social System ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Single Voice

This chapter discusses the gender politics of ‘bluestocking philosophy’. The idea of a single, unified conceptualization of what constituted a bluestocking and what was understood as a bluestocking philosophy is somewhat misleading, as the idea of a single voice emerging from this group is almost a contradiction in terms. What can be identified is who made up the bluestocking circles and what they aspired to be and to do. Elizabeth Montagu was a central figure in the development of bluestocking circles and, along with Elizabeth Vesey and Frances Boscawen, helped to forge a public identity for women public intellectuals through Montagu's own scholarship as well as her support for other women writers. The early bluestocking circles were not established as a vehicle for promoting equity or women's rights, or even rights of citizenship. However, they played an important role in the second half of the 18th century in entrenching cultural and social transformation into the social system. In addition, they ‘played a crucial role in a widening and defining of women's social roles in the eighteenth century’.

Tales of Two Families, 1793–1800

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Legal Standing ◽  
Mothers Of Color ◽  
Key Characters

This chapter charts the experiences of mixed-race migrants competing with legitimate relatives in Britain. In particular, it examines a number of inheritance lawsuits between Jamaicans of color in Britain and their white relatives over a shared colonial estate. It contends that constrictions in the definition and legal standing of kinship at the turn to the nineteenth century suddenly made mixed-race Jamaicans improper members of extended, Atlantic families. Increasing discomfort with mixed-race family members is also demonstrated in sentimental fiction at the time. The chapter assesses a large number of novels and fictional tracts in the last decade of the eighteenth century that included migrants of color as key characters in their stories. The inclusion of such characters was employed to excoriate the illegitimacy, marginal position, and racial divergence of mixed-race people in Britain. Finally, the chapter traces the experiences of the mothers of color left in Jamaica and the ways they attempted to advocate for their children across the Atlantic.

Going Public

2013 ◽  
pp. 102-145
Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Writing Culture ◽  
Women Of Letters

This chapter investigates the literary activity of enlightened Jewish women, discussing their attitudes towards authorship and what the crucial decision to publish their writings meant in the context of their time. As female authors, these Jewish women of letters were part of a broader phenomenon in contemporary Europe. Throughout the eighteenth century and especially towards its end, a female writing culture was developing simultaneously in various lands. Although the pace and nature of this literary expansion differed from place to place, depending on specific local conditions, countries including Germany, France, and England all saw a dramatic increase in the number of women active in the field of literature. The chapter then looks at the literary careers and the attitudes towards publishing of four of the Jewish women writers from the period, namely Esther Gad, Dorothea Mendelssohn, Rahel Levin, and Sara Meyer.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document