scholarly journals Politicizing Aesthetics

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Detsi-Diamanti

The aim of this paper is to explore the changing aesthetic and ideological connotations of the representation of America as an Indian woman in the sixteenth-century engravings of the discovery and conquest of the New World and the late-eighteenth-century political cartoons of America's national conflict and eventual secession from mother England. In both cases, the male enterprise of colonization and nation-making is aesthetically expressed in the fetishistic and symbolic representation of the female body as the simultaneously alluring and devouring female, seductively naked before the white male European, and as the victim of political violence and the national struggle for independence.

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-98
Author(s):  
Michael Bies

This article deals with representations of equator crossings in travel literature. Focusing on the accounts of European travelers to Brazil, it considers descriptions of crossing-the-line ceremonies that were performed on board ships since the sixteenth century and shows that, since the late eighteenth century, writers have increasingly staged crossings of the equator as an individual and private experience. Furthermore, it addresses the relation of travel and knowledge that descriptions of equator crossings establish by referring to distinctive epistemological approaches to the New World and by producing a “liminal knowledge” characteristic of travel narratives. The article draws on travel literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, paying special attention to the postromantic description of an equator crossing in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous memoir Tristes Tropiques.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 1269-1325
Author(s):  
Ethan Matt Kavaler

Early modern ornament might profitably be considered as a set of systems, each with its own rules. It signaled wealth and status. It offered pleasure and prompted curiosity. It cut across the apparent divide between the vernacular and the classicizing. It was relational, understood in the context of a given subject but not necessarily subservient to it. The notion of ornament as essentially supplemental and the prejudice against ornamental excess are both children of the late eighteenth century. Both ideas depend on a post-Enlightenment conviction of the work of art as an autonomous, aesthetically self-sufficient object, an idea not fully formed in the early modern era.


1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 363-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. M. Jacob

The aim of this paper is to examine the evidence from a number of charity schools, for attitudes towards the childhood of the ‘poorer sort’ in the early eighteenth century. Conventionally it has been claimed that lack of affection, and even brutality, characterized the relationship between parents, especially fathers, and their children. Lawrence Stone, in particular, has promoted the view that, as a result of the very high mortality rate among children until the late eighteenth century, parents did not invest much affection in them in order to insulate themselves from the sorrow resulting from their likely deaths before reaching adulthood. This view was also taken by Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt. They pointed out the formality of address seen in letters between children and parents of the upper classes, and suggested that cruelty to children and flogging was commonplace at all levels of society. These views have been challenged by Linda Pollock, who has suggested that, when examined carefully, the evidence suggests that, from the sixteenth century at least, nearly all children seem to have been wanted, loved, and cared for. She claims that the majority of children were not subject to brutality, and that physical punishment was used relatively infrequently and as a last resort. Pollock suggests that from the eighteenth century onwards parents were much concerned with ‘training’ a child in order to ensure that he or she absorbed correct values and beliefs and would grow into a model citizen.


1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Bruce Cruikshank

In 1767 Charles III issued his famous decree expelling the Jesuits from Spain and the Spanish colonies around the world. The repercussions of this edict were felt even on Samar, a large but relatively unimportant province in the eastern Visayas in the Philippine colony (see Map One) whose missions, later parish churches, had been staffed by Jesuit missionaries from the last few years of the sixteenth century until the order of expulsion arrived on Samar in September 1768. The Jesuits were replaced by Augustinians in the pueblos of Guivan, Balangiga, and Basey; and in the rest of the pueblos by Franciscans (see Map Two).


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Trevor Burnard

Abstract White Jamaicans developed a drinking culture that drew on British precedents, but which mutated in the tropics into a form of sociability different from how sociability operated in mid-eighteenth Enlightenment Europe, where civility was a much-aspired-to norm. In this article, I use works by eighteenth-century social commentators on Jamaica – Edward Long and especially J. B. Moreton – to explore how white Jamaicans developed a form of sociability which in Long was praised as showing Jamaicans as a generous and hospitable people but which in Moreton was described, more accurately, as a distinctive and unattractive form of debauchery, oriented around excessive drinking and sexual exploitation of enslaved women and free women of colour. The overwhelming importance of slavery in Jamaica accentuated the trends towards a debauched version of hospitality that stressed white male pleasure over everything else as a central animating value in society.


Author(s):  
María Jesús García Garrosa

RESUMENEl estudio aborda los aspectos comercial y sociológico de la difusión de los clásicos en la España dieciochesca. Utilizaré dos tipos de fuentes: anuncios en la prensa sobre la puesta a la venta de ciertas obras significativas y listas de suscripción. El análisis de los precios y formas de comercialización supone un primer acercamiento al grado de difusión que pudieron alcanzar los autores clásicos en traducciones contemporáneas o en reediciones (normalmente revisadas, ampliadas o anotadas) de versiones del siglo XVI. Posteriormente estudiaré las listas de suscripción a cuatro obras vendidas por este sistema en la última década del siglo; los datos que esos listados proporcionan y la identificación de los nombres que figuran en ellos ayudarán a trazar un perfil sociocultural de sus compradores, permitiendo presentar una aproximación al público lector de las versiones españolas de autores clásicos en el último tercio del siglo XVIII.PALABRAS CLAVELibros vendidos por suscripción, autores grecolatinos, anuncios en la prensa, precios, perfil sociocultural de los lectores, España de finales del siglo XVIII. TITLEThe Price of Reading the Classics in the Eighteenth Century: Spanish Readers of Translations Sold by SubscriptionABSTRATCThe present study focuses on commercial and sociological features of the dissemination of classical texts in eighteenth-century Spain. It makes use of two types of source material: press advertisements detailing the sale of certain major works and subscription lists. The analysis of prices and retail methods in the press enables an initial calculation of purchase statistics for Spanish buyers achieved by new translations or re-editions(usually revised, amplified or annotated) of translations carried out in the sixteenth century. There follows an examination of subscription lists of four works sold by this method in the final decade of the eighteenth century. The data provided by such lists and the identification of those whose names they include permit a social and cultural profile of their purchasers to be constructed, providing a picture of the reading public for Spanish translations of classical authors in the final third of the eighteenth century.KEY WORDSBooks sold by subscription, Greek and Roman authors, press advertisements, prices, social and cultural profile of readership, late eighteenth-century Spain.


2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-146
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams

Abstract In the preface to his neoclassical tragedy Monzongo, of de koningklyke slaaf (1774), Nicolaas Simon van Winter advocates for the gradual abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. He declares that he wrote this play in reaction to the brutal executions of African rebels after the nearly successful slave revolt in the Dutch colony of Berbice. The plot, however, centers around the enslavement of the Mexicans by Hernán Cortés in the early sixteenth century. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s notion of ‘silencing’ the past (1995), this article explores the absence of the Dutch Atlantic in Monzongo. Van Winter’s choice to present enslaved Amerindians under a Spanish yoke, I will argue, is strongly connected to late-eighteenth-century ideas about suppression, the legitimacy of revolt, and ‘race’ in the Dutch Republic.


Author(s):  
Mark Lounibos

Following a feminist/materialist concept of “choratic reading,” this chapter argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's English Jacobin novel Nature and Art highlights environmental agency in the context of political and social injustice. Inchbald’s use of chiasmic irony further reveals how the disavowal of non-human agency acts as the very condition for exploitation of both non-human and human actors, particularly the unpaid menial, reproductive and nutritive work of women in late-eighteenth-century England. In this sense, there is nothing more “environmental” than the laboring, gendered, and exploited female body. This chapter suggests that future study of Inchbald focus on the networks of human and non-human agents in her work and how these networks gesture towards a radical political ecology.


Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

Asking why adaptation has been seen as more problematic to theorize than other humanities subjects, and why it has been more theoretically problematic in the humanities than in the sciences and social sciences, Theorizing Adaptation seeks to both explicate and redress “the problem of theorizing adaptation” through a metacritical history of theorizing adaptation from the late sixteenth century to the present, a metatheoretical theory of the relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities, and analysis of and experimentation with the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation. Adaptation was not always the bad theoretical object that it increasingly became from the late eighteenth century: in earlier centuries, adaptation was celebrated and valued as a means of aesthetic and cultural progress. Tracing the falling fortunes of adaptation under humanities theorization, the history nevertheless locates dissenting voices valorizing adaptation in every period. Adaptation studies can learn from history not only how to theorize adaptation more positively, but also to consider “the problem of theorization” for adaptation. The metatheoretical section finds that theorization and adaptation are rival, overlapping, inimical processes, each seeking to remake culture—and each other—in their images. It is not simply the case that adaptation has to adapt to theorization: rather, theorization needs to adapt to and through adaptation. The final section attends to the rhetoric of theorizing adaptation, analyzing how tiny pieces of rhetoric have constructed adaptation’s relationship to theorization, and turning to figurative rhetoric, or figuration, as a third process that can mediate between adaptation and theorization and refigure their relationship.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Dewar

Abstract This paper examines the published accounts of three British travellers, Patrick Campbell (fl. c. 1765-1823), Isaac Weld (1774-1856), and George Heriot (1759-1839), to North America in the late eighteenth century. Focusing specifically on the travellers' scientific approaches to the natural landscape, it argues that they drew on eighteenth-century European scientific developments, including empirical observation, the evolution and instability of matter, and systems of classification, to facilitate their understanding of unfamiliar phenomena. The travellers' scientific observations revealed both an intellectual interest in the origin of landforms and a utilitarian view of wildlife and natural resources. Attracted to the novel and curious, the travellers' scientific speculations merged with initial aesthetic responses, highlighting a preoccupation with the power, spontaneity and magnitude of nature.


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