Petrarch in Britain

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Literary Legacy

Petrarch was Italy's second most famous writer (after Dante), and indeed from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries he was much better known and more influential in English literature than Dante. His Italian love lyrics constituted the major influence on European love poetry for at least two centuries from 1400 to 1600, and in Britain he was imitated by Chaucer, the Elizabethans, and other lyric poets up until the end of the eighteenth century. With Romanticism Dante ousted Petrarch from his pre-eminent position, but in our post-Romantic age, attention has now started to swing back to Petrarch. This volume is a survey of Petrarch's literary legacy in Britain. Starting with his own views of those whom he called the ‘barbari Britanni’, the volume then explores a number of key topics: Petrarch's analysis of the self; his dialogue with other classical and Italian authors; Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism in Renaissance Italy; Petrarchism in England and Scotland; and Petrarch's modern legacy in both Italy and Britain. Many important texts and poets are considered, including Giordano Bruno, Leopardi, Foscolo, Ascham, Sidney, Spenser, and Walter Savage Landor.

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.

The Market

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Self ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Market Institutions ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
The Right ◽  
Objective Existence

The market has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hardwired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements that allow people to recognize themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasized the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.

scholarly journals Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-325
Author(s):  
C. A. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Human Interest ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference

One of the notable changes in English literature during the eighteenth century is a growth in altruism. It is a change which involves not only a breaking down of the old aristocratic indifference to the lower classes of society during the Restoration, but the establishment of a new ethical theory; literature displayed a broader human interest and assigned a new reason for its sympathy. It is usually assumed that the difference is due principally to the influx of French philosophy. This assumption at least minimizes the importance of a development which had taken place in the literature of England itself before the general interest in Rousseau. (The change, especially in poetry, is to be traced largely, I think, to the Characteristics (1711) of Lord Shaftesbury, whose importance as a literary influence in England has never been duly recognized. It has long since been established that his system of philosophy constitutes a turning-point in the history of pure speculation, especially in ethics; it has more recently been shown also that he is responsible for many of the moral ideas which inform the popular literature of Germany from Haller to Herder. But his influence upon the popular writers of his own country has received scant notice.

Language, Religion, Nation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This chapter traces the popular usage of “genius” in the nineteenth century. If genius no longer has the self-evidence that was attributed to it in the eighteenth century, this is due in part to the profligacy with which the word had come to be used. While the term is widely invoked—in fact, ever more widely so—it is rarely the subject of sustained theoretical scrutiny of the type established by aesthetics and philosophy in the previous century. The genius celebrated in this popular usage was, more often than not, a collective phenomenon linking success or supremacy with the individual character of institutional or abstract entities in a way that combined genius as ingenium with genius as the form of superlative excellence.

The Noble Cadet Corps and the “Germans,” 1730s

2019 ◽  
pp. 134-170
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Educational Institution ◽  
The Self ◽  
Elite School ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Military School ◽  
Faculty And Staff ◽  
Court Politics

This chapter explores the establishment of the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg (1731), the most important educational institution for the nobility in Russia in the eighteenth century, in the context of court politics of the era. The creation of a military school and its design might be expected to naturally follow from the needs of the army. Instead, the chapter demonstrates that the Corps served as instrument for the self-promotion efforts of its ambitious founder, Field Marshal von Münnich, and that it is due to his unique standing at the court that the school enjoyed imperial patronage and received funding on a scale unimaginable under Peter I. Once established, the Corps became a platform for the enterprising efforts of its faculty and staff and, insofar as these were recruited largely through the Pietists networks, also for their pedagogical experiments that defined the educational profile of this elite school.

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