Automata, plot machinery and the imperial Gothic in Richard Marsh’s The Goddess

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Hultgren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Fantastic

This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian imperial Gothic mode of writing. It suggests that Marsh’s novel demystifies the occult and supernatural aspects of the imperial Gothic through its depiction of a mechanical goddess. Marsh’s goddess is notable because she is not a supernatural being but an automaton, an example of ‘clockwork machinery’ set in violent motion by the novel’s criminal antagonist. Marsh’s novel looks back to Tipu’s tiger, a late-eighteenth-century automaton from Mysore, India, which enacted the death of an Englishman by a tiger. Marsh recalls Indian violence against the English through a fictional reimagining of the tiger, a familiar museum piece, as a goddess. The exposure of the goddess’s machinery is a shocking aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its veil of mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates imperial Gothic conventions.

The Appeal of the Fantastic and the Improbable in Late Eighteenth-Century Children's Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-91
Author(s):  
Hossein Nazari ◽  
Maryam Khorasani
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pocket Book ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Children's Stories

Eighteenth-century children's authors implicitly exploited the fantastic and the improbable aspects of fairy tales to complement the persuasiveness of their moralistic teachings. Whereas the coexistence of chapbook residue with middle-class pedagogy in eighteenth-century children's books has already been underlined in scholarly studies, little critical attention has been paid to the rhetorical effects exercised by the incorporation of the fantastic and the improbable in eighteenth-century children's stories. Through appealing to the audience's collective imagination, eighteenth-century children's authors both derived from and built upon a set of common aspirations shared by a middle-class audience, thus cultivating a sense of what Kenneth Burke termed consubstantiality among the readers. Focussing on John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), The History of Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and Maria Edgeworth's ‘The Orphans’ (1796), this study explores the modus operandi through which late-eighteenth-century children's authors sought to communicate serious messages by employing improbable plotlines.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

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