scholarly journals Old World Conventions and New World Curiosities: North American Landscapes Through European Eyes

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Dewar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Intellectual Interest

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.

scholarly journals Interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s image of the afterlife in the novel Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article reviews scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. The foundations of a slave trade historiography date to the late eighteenth-century abolition movements in North America, Britain, and France. Before then, occasional voices sounded in protest. The Dominican friar Tomás de Mercado, for example, published in 1569 an anti-slave trade tract based on his observations of slave sales in Seville and of the institution of slavery in Mexico. From 1698 to 1714, 198 pamphlets concerning the Royal African Company's monopoly were published in England. With the founding of the world's first antislavery crusade, antislavery advocates came to predominate among the researchers who were seeking information on the slave trade. Abolitionist energies coalesced in 1787–9 in London with the formation of anti-slave trade committees and the subsequent British parliamentary inquiries. In this three-year period at least twenty-five British, American, and French authors wrote about the slave trade, a total that would not be reached again until the 1970s, when academics organized the first major conferences on Atlantic slaving.

Ireland: Oppression and Opportunity

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-214
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Stable State ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colony ◽  
Established Church

This chapter considers Ireland's condition during the late eighteenth century. The Genevans presented Ireland as a new and stable state, pregnant with possibility for enlightened living and commercial development. Yet that was not entirely the case. At the time, Ireland was undergoing constitutional and economic upheaval. Moreover, Ireland was seen to be in crisis in part because of the effects of events in North America upon trade. Ireland did, however, remain Protestant and a British colony, with an Anglican established church. Thus the events of the late 1770s and early 1780s were a response to the new Ireland that had been created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The One and the Manor

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Possessive Individualism ◽  
The One ◽  
Jane West

Chapter two reassesses the conservatism of Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. It argues that we have misunderstood the novel by reading it in relation to the late eighteenth-century philosophy of Edmund Burke and socially conservative novelists like Jane West when, in fact, Mansfield Park is governed by a much older of social organization—the manor—not based on the liberal assumption of possessive individualism. Seeing the novel through the lens of the manor, the chapter argues, helps explain many of its most perplexing and difficult features: among them, the meekness of Fanny Price; the dissatisfactions of its ending; and the often distant or impersonal strategies of narration.

scholarly journals Politicizing Aesthetics

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Detsi-Diamanti
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Female Body ◽  
New World ◽  
White Male ◽  
Symbolic Representation ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

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.

Narrative Direction

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-77
Author(s):  
Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Character Development ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sense Of Purpose ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Narrative Techniques

This essay approaches Goethe’s novel from the perspective of historical shifts and new poetic models in the late eighteenth century, which took the form of a feeling of increased contingency or randomness in an individual’s life. It argues that Goethe uses narrative techniques to create a balance between the episodic and the developmental, the parts of the novel and its trajectory as a whole. Wilhelm’s character development and these formal characteristics combine to solicit imaginative engagement on the part of readers of the novel, who, in thinking about these things, may come to a better understanding of the contingency in their own lives. The essay argues that Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship offers not only a detailed depiction of contingency in human life but also a suggestion that aesthetic experience might hold out the possibility of acknowledging and managing that contingency to create a sense of purpose and meaning.

The Satire of Walker's Vagabond on Rousseau and Godwin

PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh H. MacMullan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
View Point ◽  
Large Section ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought

George Walker, a London bookseller and publisher, author of several Gothic tales, printed in 1799 a satirical novel, The Vagabond, directed against the Jacobins and their philosophic forerunners. The author's purpose was a serious one, to refute and counteract the works that had poured from the Jacobin presses. As a result the novel, though amusing and fanciful in the manner of the Anti-Jacobin, represents a consistent view-point and an earnest desire to show the beauties of society as then organized. In its way, it is a summary of the reactionary position, and, by giving the opinions of the opponents of Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Holcroft, Paine, William Godwin, and others, illustrates a large section of late eighteenth-century thought.

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-138
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Almost All

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.

Relations between North America and the Italian Peninsula, 1763-1799: Tuscany, Genoa and Naples

Rough Waters ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Codignola
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Complex Networks ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
British North America ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explores the late eighteenth century relationship between North America and the states of the Italian Peninsula, in attempt to challenge the notion of a homogenous Atlantic world. It reveals a myriad of complex networks - commercial, political, and familial - that facilitated trade between Tuscany, Genoa, Naples, British North America, and the United States. It examines these networks primarily through the cod trade, but also considers wheat, tobacco, sugar, and others. It follows case studies of prominent traders, including Filippo Mazzei; Anton Francesco Salucci; Nicola Filicchi; and Stefano Ceronio, and concludes that, despite popular scholarly opinion garnered from factors such as the failure of diplomacy between the nations, trade between the United States and Italy before 1815 was consistently strong and bolstered through business and familial networks.

Early Gothic Novels and the Belief in Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Gothic Novels

This chapter looks at Gothic novels. A Gothic Romance or even ‘a Gothic Story’ may be one thing, but a Gothic Novel is something else again. Though that term has been retrospectively applied to a body of macabre, sensational, ghost-infested fiction from the late eighteenth century only since the early twentieth, in its suggestion of a perverse hybridizing of the outmoded and the up-to-date it aptly captures the transgressiveness these fictions represented for their original critics. More directly than the contemporary fictions that aspired to be life-like and observe the norms of probability, Gothic novels foreground that peculiar mental gymnastics that since the eighteenth century has enabled readers to participate in a secular culture industry ‘which invites the subtle and supple deployment of belief’. In this sense, by helping to define the frontiers of the fictive, the Gothic mode did not interrupt the rise of the novel, but instead completed it.

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