The Eighteenth Centuries

The Eighteenth Centuries PDF

Author: David T. Gies

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2018-02-02

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0813940761

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Today, when "globalization" is a buzzword invoked in nearly every realm, we turn back to the eighteenth century and witness the inherent globalization of its desires and, at times, its accomplishments. During the chronological eighteenth century, learning and knowledge were intimately connected across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, yet the connections themselves are largely unstudied. In The Eighteenth Centuries, twenty-two scholars across disciplines address the idea of plural Enlightenments and a global eighteenth century, transcending the demarcations that long limited our grasp of the period’s breadth and depth. Engaging concepts that span divisions of chronology and continent, these essays address topics ranging from mechanist biology, painted geographies, and revolutionary opera to Americanization, theatrical subversion of marriage, and plantation architecture. Weaving together many disparate threads of the historical tapestry we call the Enlightenment, this volume illuminates our understanding of the interconnectedness of the eighteenth centuries.

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century PDF

Author: Jacob Sider Jost

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0813945062

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Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century

Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century PDF

Author: Susan Naquin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780300046021

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During the eighteenth century, China's new Manchu rulers consolidated their control of the largest empire China had ever known. In this book Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski draw on the most recent research to provide a unique overview and reevaluation of the social history of China during this period--one of the most dynamic periods in China's early modern era. "A lucid, original, and scholarly summary of the social, economic, and demographic history of China's last great period of glory. This will be an important book for students of Chinese history."--Jonathan Spence, Yale University "Engaging, complex, and elegantly written. . . . Absorbing and valuable: a thorough, unique, and richly detailed account of the social forms and cultural and religious life of the people."--Choice " An] interesting and well-informed survey of China between about 1680 and 1820."--W.J.F. Jenner, Asian Affairs "I would be a very odd scholar or general reader who could not derive profit from reading this elegant and painstaking survey of the social, cultural, and economic life of the Qing empire in its apparent prime. . . . A superb survey which readers may absorb and cherish."--Alexander Woodside, Pacific Affairs "A highly readable synthesis of recent secondary literature on the subject."--William S. Atwell, Journal of Asian Studies "Their coverage is comprehensive and their writing is clear and lucid. reading this book obtains one a very broad, yet penetrative, view of Chinese society at the time."--Alan P.L. Liu, Asian Thought & Society "The ground covered by this book is vast. . . . Its very breadth conveys with great clarity the extent of current knowledge of premodern China: it also serves as an excellent introduction to the social history of the Qing dynasty."--Hugh D.R. Baker, China Quarterly "This is a most challenging work and ambitious work. . . . Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century give both the general reader and also the historian who does not study China a tool for grounding himself or herself in the basic patterns and trends that could be found in eighteenth century China as well as in the problems the specialists are now exploring. The book is also of great value to students of traditional and modern China, for it serves to synthesize much of the new literature on China in the High Qing. Thus it serves the 'China hand' as a state of the field essay that shows just where we are even as it suggests directions for future research."--Murray A. Rubinstein, American Asian Review "This excellent book provides an intelligent summary our rapidly changing understanding of Chinese society in a crucial century of political stability and economic and demographic expansion. Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski are distinguished contributors to the field, energetically engaged in its multinational communication networks."--John E. Wills, Jr., American Historical Review

Frankenstein and STEAM

Frankenstein and STEAM PDF

Author: Robin Hammerman

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2022-02-11

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1644532522

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Charles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Delaware, definitively transformed study of the novel Frankenstein with his foundational volume The Frankenstein Notebooks and, in nineteenth century studies more broadly, brought heightened attention to the nuances of writing and editing. Frankenstein and STEAM consolidates the generative legacy of his later work on the novel's broad relation to topics in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). Seven chapters written by leading and emerging scholars pay homage to Robinson's later perspectives of the novel and a concluding postscript contains remembrances by his colleagues and students. This volume not only makes explicit the question of what it means to be human, a question Robinson invited students and colleagues to examine throughout his career, but it also illustrates the depth of the field and diversity of those who have been inspired by Robinson's work. Frankenstein and STEAM offers direction for continuing scholarship on the intersections of literature, science, and technology. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century

Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century PDF

Author: Veronica Kelly

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1994-09-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 080476638X

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Twelve scholars from the fields of English, French, and German literature here examine the complex ways in which the human body becomes the privileged semiotic model through which eighteenth-century culture defines its political and conceptual centers. In making clear that the deployment of the body varies tremendously depending on what is meant by the 'human body', the essays draw on popular literature, poetics and aesthetics, garden architecture, physiognomy, beauty manuals, pornography and philosophy, as well as on canonical works in the genres of the novel and the drama.

European Art of the Eighteenth Century

European Art of the Eighteenth Century PDF

Author: Daniela Tarabra

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780892369218

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"The Art Through the Century series introduces readers to important visual vocabulary of Western art."--Back cover.

The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers

The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers PDF

Author: Carl Lotus Becker

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780300101508

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Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers "demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials." In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at the book's continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. "Will remain a classic--a beautifully finished literary product."--Charles A. Beard, American Historical Review "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers remains one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment. . . . [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come."--Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America PDF

Author: Jennifer Van Horn

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-02-23

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1469629577

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Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France PDF

Author: Fayçal Falaky

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-11-12

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1684483425

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Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.

Appalachian Pastoral

Appalachian Pastoral PDF

Author: Michael S. Martin

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-10-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1638040192

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This project overall attempts to recast Appalachian literature in terms of a ‘lost tradition’ of texts that are generally out-of-print though of central importance to understanding the history of the region and its current environmental and cultural challenges. The epilogue will also consider the way that ecological-based literary criticism offers a vital language for how antebellum travel writers sought to frame the region from a 19th-century environmental point of view. The book aims to resituate the field of Appalachian Studies to an earlier historic genesis in the 19th-century and bring to light several books which have received scant scholarly attention in the canon of Appalachian and American literature, respectively. The book centers on the argument that mid-19th-century travel writers going through or from the Appalachian region drew on familiar versions of 18th-century European, mainly British, landscape aesthetics that would help make the readerly experience less alien to their erudite regional and Northern audiences. These travel writers, such as Philip Pendleton Kennedy and David Hunter Strother, consciously appropriated such aesthetic tropes as the pastoral as a way to further dramatic the effect in their nonfiction accounts of Appalachia, while the reader could find such references comforting as they considered whether to domesticate or tour the Appalachian region.