Searching for a ‘Middle Class’? Francesco Mario Pagano and the Public for Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

2016 ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie's “Introductory Discourse”

PMLA ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Public World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Character Types

In the preface to her first volume of plays, the Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie claims that one is naturally driven to classify persons into character types, and she argues that this classification should be based on the passions individuals express rather than the fashions they wear. Despite this anticonsumerist stance, however, Baillie's project is shaped by the logic of late-eighteenth-century consumerism: Baillie conceives of passions as items susceptible to inventory, display, and sale. Her interest in establishing a human taxonomy grounded in ostensibly natural and subtle discriminations of character allies her works with other popular consumer goods of the period, from clothing fashions to studies of physiognomy. Moreover, like the aesthetic of the picturesque, Baillie's aesthetic encodes a peculiarly consumerist form of desire, a desire that can never be satisfied because it aims at acquisition rather than possession. In Baillie, the feelings and desires on which modern subjectivity is founded do not spring from deep within but are formed by, and find their meaning in, the public world of the marketplace.

scholarly journals VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Martina Domines Veliki
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.

The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Hossein Nazari ◽  
Maryam Khorasani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pocket Book ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Children's Stories

Eighteenth-century children's authors implicitly exploited the fantastic and the improbable aspects of fairy tales to complement the persuasiveness of their moralistic teachings. Whereas the coexistence of chapbook residue with middle-class pedagogy in eighteenth-century children's books has already been underlined in scholarly studies, little critical attention has been paid to the rhetorical effects exercised by the incorporation of the fantastic and the improbable in eighteenth-century children's stories. Through appealing to the audience's collective imagination, eighteenth-century children's authors both derived from and built upon a set of common aspirations shared by a middle-class audience, thus cultivating a sense of what Kenneth Burke termed consubstantiality among the readers. Focussing on John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and Maria Edgeworth's ‘The Orphans’ (1796), this study explores the modus operandi through which late-eighteenth-century children's authors sought to communicate serious messages by employing improbable plotlines.

Evelina

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Burney ◽  
Vivien Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Aggression ◽  
The Public ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Popular Novel ◽  
The Way

‘Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him! O these fashionable people!’ Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina's innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions - as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville. Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women's position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader.

Unveiling Nature: Wonder and Deception in Eighteenth-Century London Shows and Exhibitions

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lavinia Maddaluno
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

This paper examines six exhibitions of machines, clocks, and automata which were performed in the squares, salons and coffee-houses of late eighteenth-century London. It does not take into account those natural philosophers whose enquiries were acknowledged by institutional science, rather focusing on those mechanicks, illusionists, and circus owners (Gulielmo Pittachio, John Joseph Merlin, Benjamin Rackstrow, Henry Breslaw, Philip Astley and James Cox), often collocated in the category of charlatans. By taking into account original advertisements, catalogues and pamphlets, it argues that these shows, with their moments of veiling and unveiling, their dissimilar “methods” to astonish and induce credulity in the beholders, and their separation from institutional venues, were still conceived as places to enlighten and edify the mind, and conveyed concepts such as wonder, deception, curiosity and philosophical understanding to the public.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-321
Author(s):  
Uri Erman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Anti Jewish

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.

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