“Une grâce, une modestie, un sérieux”: The Reforming Neo-Classicism of Sedaine’s Philosophe sans le savoir

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-188
Author(s):  
D.R. Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Movement

The objective of this article is to explain how Michel-Jean Sedaine’s play Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765), considered the most successful example of the drame bourgeois, is characterised not only by the theatrical innovations advocated by Diderot in his writing on drama, but by central aspects of the reforming aesthetic movement that dominated the last half of the eighteenth century, and which has come to be known as neo-classicism.

A Revivalist Ars Poetica for an Itinerant Coterie

2020 ◽  
pp. 170-202
Author(s):  
Wendy Raphael Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Ars Poetica ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Historical Nature

This chapter argues that evangelical wit and poetic networks were central to evangelical conversion, itinerancy, and verse culture (both evangelical and nonevangelical). In fact, to understand evangelicalism as an aesthetic movement means acknowledging itinerant networks as large scale poetic coteries and extemporenous preaching as part of the larger culture of wit in the eighteenth century. By looking at the Virginian itinerant minister James Ireland’s conversion narrative, Roberts shows how poetics and sociability could work in the opposite direction of Erskine, Moorhead, Davies, and Wheatley to help construct a muscularized and white evangelical masculinity among male poet-ministers. The chapter also shows how Ireland’s narrative reveals the importance of revival poetic forms to conversion and to a larger poetic history. Roberts argues that poems became crucial artifacts of evangelical conversion and its punctiliar and historical nature. Perhaps most importantly, she argues that revival poetics was crucial to the development of the lyric and helped constitute its particular mode of address to the stranger.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Wendy Raphael Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Verse Forms

This chapter states, and briefly explains, the main claims of the book: that early evangelicalism must be understood as a central aesthetic movement of the eighteenth century; and that to understand early evangelicalism as it first took shape requires sustained attention to its prolific poetry. The chapter situates the book, which is the first history of early American non-hymnal poetry, within the current scholarship of early American culture and poetry, early evangelical history and hymnody, and British eighteenth-century enthusiasm. The author defines evangelicalism (as primarily a way of feeling and doing “authentic” Christianity) and then three new terms this study introduces: revival poetry (a constellation of verse forms, which addresses the tendency to associate evangelical poetry soley with hymnody); poet-minister (a revitalized role at the nexus of the affective sermon and aesthetic oriented conversion); and print itinerant (an evangelical conception of print within the new practices of itinerancy). The author concludes with a narrative summary of the book and each of the chapters.

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