Ways of thinking, ways of writing: novelistic expression of radicalism in the works of Godwin, Holcroft and Bage

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Leclair
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Three Components

In her essay Marion Leclair studies the novels of Godwin, Holcroft and Bage from the perspective of novelistic conventions. She argues that the fact that these eighteenth-century British radical novelists posed a challenge to established authority is reflected in the form of their novels. She explains how Godwin, Holcroft and Bage subverted three components of the prevailing novelistic order – style, plot and narration. She insists that the works of all three express a criticism of the conventional style of novels, seen as formulaic and untrue to life. In return, they had an embryonic stylistic programme for their novels which rejected the conventional style of such highly popular and marketable novels as sentimental novels and gothic romances. Leclair concludes that recasting the conventional novelistic mould allowed these writers to challenge the politics and morals of their time.

Late Novels

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-100
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.

The Impossibility of Liberal Secularism: Religious (In)tolerance, Spirituality, and Not-Religion

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Brent Crosson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
British Caribbean ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Secular Power

AbstractThis article re-thinks the problem of religious (in)tolerance by analyzing the 2015 deportation of three “Hindu priests” from a Caribbean nation for the practice of obeah. Defined popularly as “witchcraft” or “African tradition,” obeah was first criminalized as the alleged inspiration for the largest slave uprising of the eighteenth century British Caribbean. I argue that the recent deportations in a nation that constitutionally enshrines freedom of conscience foregrounds some of the foundational limits of liberal secularism. I trace a genealogy of liberalism to critique the secular ideal of the “freedom from difference.” I suggest that attempts to invoke “spirituality” as a more inclusive idiom for denigrated forms of “not-religion” such as obeah extend rather than eliminate these limits of liberal secularism. I close by drawing some parallels with anti-Muslim nationalism in theu.s.and suggest some ways of thinking about a trinary formation of religion, not-religion, and secular power in modern nation-states.

Advocating Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century: Exemplarity and Quantification

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mass Treatment ◽  
Inoculation Methods ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

ArgumentSmallpox inoculation was introduced in Europe in the early eighteenth century and has been considered the first mass treatment of disease based on practical use of probability calculations and mathematical tools of computation. The article argues that these new approaches were deeply entangled with other rationalities, most emphatically that of exemplarity. Changes in inoculation methods around mid-century gradually changed the conceptualization of disease, seeing all cases as fundamentally equal, and thus making it more relevant to count them. Arithmetic changed the ways of thinking about smallpox epidemics, but new ways of conceptualizing disease were vital to making it a matter of arithmetic at all. The article investigates what happened when numbers and figures were introduced into medical matters: Who did the figures really concern, and what types of argument were they fitted into? How were numbers transformed into metaphors, and how did quantitative argument work together with arguments from exemplarity?

Negotiating Female Authorship in Eighteenth-Century India: Gender and Multilingualism in a Persian Text

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-466
Author(s):  
ZAHRA SHAH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractIn the last years of the eighteenth century, an Indian woman authored a work in Persian intended for the entertainment and guidance of students of that language. EntitledMiftāḥ-i Qulūb-i Mubtadiyān(‘The Key of the Hearts of Beginners’), the work comprised of stories from vernacular oral traditions as well as extracts from well-known Persian poetic, historical and ethical works. Although the work was translated into English in 1908 by Annette Beveridge, it has received no serious scholarly attention. Drawing upon recent scholarship offering new ways of thinking about India's multilingual literary past, this article examines the intersection of multiple vernacular and generic traditions as translated and manifested inMiftāḥ-i Qulūb al-Mubtadīyān. While vernacular languages followed different, and in relative terms, more limited routes of circulation and exchange in comparison with cosmopolitan languages such as Persian, their paths of movement were no less significant. Through a close reading of this work and its context, this article seeks to understand how Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula crafted a distinct, cosmopolitan voice for herself through her deployment of both Persianate and regional Indian traditions.

The ‘Franklins of Colombia’: Immigration Schemes and Hemispheric Solidarity in the Making of a Civilised Colombian Nation

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 673-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERNESTO BASSI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Work Ethic ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Diplomatic Recognition ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

AbstractDuring the 1820s, Colombia's diplomats in London, Washington and Philadelphia worked hard to obtain diplomatic recognition for their nascent republic. Their efforts were also geared towards making Colombia attractive to European and North American settlers whose industry and work ethic would, they hoped, turn it into a civilised and modern Euro-Atlantic nation. The immigration schemes they promoted enable us to understand the type of nations the nation-makers of post-independence Spanish America envisioned and how, by appealing to sentiments of hemispheric solidarity – among other means – they sought to turn their visions into reality. A comparison with similar eighteenth-century schemes promoted by the Bourbons, moreover, reveals the persistence, albeit with some critical modifications, of late-colonial ways of thinking and envisioning society.

Byron and the Politics of Paradise

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 571-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward E. Bostetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Universe

In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”

scholarly journals Eloquence and Education. School Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Rhetorik ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Rimm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rhetorical Education ◽  
Essential Component ◽  
Education School ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
Latin Schools ◽  
Three Components

AbstractThe following contribution will examine the form and content of school rhetoric in the Latin schools of early modern Sweden. After an introduction to the schools, an outline of their curricular heritage will be given, situating school rhetoric in the classical trivium. Three components of rhetorical education are identified: the theoretical teaching, the reading of exemplary texts, and the exercises, all three components displaying a striking traditionalism and stability during the eighteenth century. Furthermore, it will be shown that rhetorical education also served as a means of instilling virtue in pupils and that rhetoric was an essential component in the reproduction of a representative learned culture and in the formation of virtuous character and erudite identity.

Revisiting The Polite and Commercial People

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Current Direction ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Thirtieth Anniversary ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Impact

For some time before his death in July 2015, former colleagues and students of Paul Langford had discussed the possibility of organizing a festschrift to celebrate his remarkable contribution to eighteenth-century history. It was planned for 2019 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of his seminal A Polite and Commercial People, the opening volume in the New Oxford History of England series, Paul’s best-known and most influential publication. He was delighted to hear of these plans and the tragic news of his death only made the contributors more determined to see the project through to completion. The importance of A Polite and Commercial People within its own time is unquestionable. Not only did it provide a powerful new vision of eighteenth-century Britain, but it also played a vital part in reviving interest in, and expanding ways of thinking about, Georgian history. As the thirteen contributors to this volume amply testify, any review of the field from the 1980s onwards cannot ignore the profound effect Paul’s research had on the social and political publications in his field. This collection of essays combines reflection on the impact of Paul’s work with further engagement with the central questions he posed. In particular, it serves to reconnect various recent avenues of Georgian studies, bringing together diverse themes present in Paul’s scholarship, but which are often studied independently of each other. As such, it aims to provide a fitting tribute to Paul’s work and impact, and a wider reassessment of the current direction of eighteenth-century studies.

Response to Christopher Peacocke: Perception

2020 ◽  
pp. 1055-1064
Author(s):  
Nicholas Cook
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Christopher Peacocke ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

Aestheticians set out principled ways of thinking about music, but usually at the expense of the inclusive approach demanded by today’s pluralistic musical culture. In this response I welcome the openness of Peacocke’s approach, suggesting some relational properties of music additional to those he discusses: the “topics” of eighteenth-century music, which condense metaphorical “hearing-as” into historical stereotypes; performance style, which always involves reference to or play with other styles; the constructions of social relationship that music affords, whether real or imagined; and history, which raises the issue of the relationship between aesthetics and the historical other. When Peacocke, like other aestheticians, says “we hear structure”, who are “we”? And who does “we” exclude? If we define music as “ours” in relation to historical or cultural others, can there actually be an aesthetics that is both principled and inclusive?

Edmund Burke's Idea of the Body Corporate: A Study in Imagery

1965 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Love
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

Burke is recognized as master of a language highly figurative, full of grace and telling images. But the imagery of nonfiction prose is not so much studied as the imagery of poetry, drama, and fiction. It should be. It reveals a great deal about a thinker. I have not studied Burke's imagery to spy on his personal life, conscious or subconscious, as some students of other writers do, nor have I tried to evaluate his style. I have used it as an oblique way of getting at the meaning of some of his concepts and I think it reveals something about his place in the history of ideas, making him a stalwart of eighteenth-century ways of thinking, instead of a harbinger of the nineteenth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document