Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Wittman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Flint
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
The Public ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

An enormously popular narrative device, speaking objects were used frequently in eighteenth-century British fiction to express authorial concerns about the circulation of books in the public sphere. Relating the speaking object to the author's status in a print culture, works featuring such narrators characteristically align authorship, commodification, and national acculturation. The objects celebrate their capacity to exploit both private and public systems of circulation, such as libraries, banks, booksellers' shops, highways, and taverns. Linking storytelling to commodities and capital, they convey an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination, economic exchange, and public use appear homologous. But as object narratives dramatize, such circulation estranges modern authors from their work. Far from mediating between private and public experience or synthesizing national and cosmopolitan values, these narratives record the indiscriminate consumption that characterizes the public sphere in a print culture.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

Deconstructing female conventions

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

scholarly journals ”Kampagnen med Blæk i stedet for Blod”: Håndskrifter, trykk og opinionskamp i skandinavisk offentlighet, 1801–1814

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 106-128
Author(s):  
Ruth Hemstad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Monitoring Activities ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Secret War

“The campaign with ink instead of blood”: Manuscripts, print and the war of opinion in the Scandinavian public sphere, 1801–1814Handwritten pamphlets circulated to a high extend as part of the war of opinion which went on in the Norwegian-Swedish borderland around 1814. This ‘campaign with ink instead of blood’, as Danish writers soon characterized this detested activity, was a vital part of the Swedish policy of conquering Norway from Denmark through the means of propaganda. This ‘secret war of opinion’, as it was described in 1803, culminated around 1814, when Sweden accomplished its long-term goal of forming a union with Norway. In this article I am concerned with the role and scope of handwritten letters, actively distributed as pamphlets as part of the Swedish monitoring activities in the borderland, especially in the period 1812 to 1813. These manuscripts were integrated parts of the manifold of publications circulating within a common, although conflict oriented Scandinavian public sphere in the making at this time. The duplication and distribution of handwritten pamphlets, and the interaction with printed material, as Danish counter pamphlets quoting and discussing these manuscripts, illustrates that manuscripts remained important at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They coexisted and interacted with printed material of different kinds, and have to be taken into consideration when studying the public sphere and the print culture in this period.

Père Trump

October ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 159 ◽  
pp. 3-6
Author(s):  
Hal Foster
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Fourth Estate ◽  
The Public ◽  
Higher Power ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Public Sphere

In the face of Trumpism and its peculiar mix of the buffoonish and the lethal, Foster suggests that we “pump up” past theoretical concepts by raising them to a higher degree. Social media, for example, could thereby be considered the “fifth estate,” a force that outdoes the “fourth estate” of journalistic media and thereby evacuates the last residues of the public sphere that, over fifty years ago, Jürgen Habermas associated with the advent of print culture. Peter Sloterdijk's notion of cynical reason, too, must be raised to a higher power in order to comprehend the Trumpist mentality; perhaps in this post-truth era, we should speak instead of “noncynical unreason”? And while the concept of the “primal father” is so outrageous that it cannot be inflated, Foster argues, it is one that we must grapple with in the face of a figure who, like Freud's figure, embodies the law and simultaneously performs its transgression.

In Search of “Fellow Pilgrims”: Radical Protestants and Transconfessional Exchanges in Europe and the British Atlantic, c. 1670–1730

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document