Author: Robert W. JonesPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521593267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
The concept of beauty in the eighteenth century, explored through philosophical texts, novels and art.
Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Author: Robert W. JonesPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521593267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
The concept of beauty in the eighteenth century, explored through philosophical texts, novels and art.
The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing
Author: James NogglePublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191635669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Is taste a quick, momentary experience in the individual mind? Or something durable, shaped by slow, historical processes, affecting groups of people at different times and places? British writers in the eighteenth century believed that it was both, and the tension between these temporal poles shaped the meaning of taste in the period and set a course for aesthetics in following centuries. Focusing on works in many genres-Alexander Pope's poems, David Hume's historiography, essays by Hannah More and Anna Barbauld, and novels by Frances Burney and William Beckford-this book sees the divided temporality of taste as an unpredictable force in British writing. The eighteenth century was the age of taste. Writers considered its intense effects on individual minds as especially characteristic of the collective present of British modernity, whilst they also recognized the disturbing tendency of taste's immediacy and its historical roles to interrupt and foreclose on each other. While noting how taste's two temporal flavours may be made to agree in order to consolidate various national, social, and gendered identities, this book also demonstrates that taste's dual temporality makes it more disruptive than scholars usually think. As such, taste models a kind of critical practice that this book itself endeavours to inherit: the insistent testing of the moment of discernment and on-going patterns of thinking and feeling against each other.
The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England
Author: David PorterPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521192994
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, Porter's readings develop new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. Illustrated with many examples of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, this is a major contribution to eighteenth-century cultural history and to the history of contact and exchange between China and the West.
Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830
Author: John StylesPublisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 382
Book Description
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Author: Ana de Freitas BoePublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317122046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
The resurgence of marriage as a transnational institution, same-sex or otherwise, draws upon as much as it departs from enlightenment ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality which this collection aims to investigate, interrogate, and conceptualize anew. Coming to terms with heteronormativity is imperative for appreciating the literature and culture of the eighteenth century writ large, as well as the myriad imaginaries of sex and sexuality that the period bequeaths to the present. This collection foregrounds British, European, and, to a lesser extent, transatlantic heteronormativities in order to pose vital if vexing questions about the degree of continuity subsisting between heteronormativities of the past and present, questions compounded by the aura of transhistoricity lying at the heart of heteronormativity as an ideology. Contributors attend to the fissures and failures of heteronormativity even as they stress the resilience of its hegemony: reconfiguring our sense of how gender and sexuality came to be mapped onto space; how public and private spheres were carved up, or gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and finally how literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices have served to buttress or contest the legacy of heteronormativity.
Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England
Author: Rosemary SweetPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
Book Description
Despite the considerable volume of research into various aspects of the social and economic, cultural and political history of eighteenth-century British towns, remarkably little has focused upon, or even reflected upon the distinctive experience of women in the urban context. Much of what research there is has explored the experience of laboring or impoverished women, or women of the social elite; by contrast, the essays in this collection take up the study of the participation of middling women in urban life. This volume brings into sharper focus the relationship between changes consequent upon urban development and shifts in the pattern of gender relations in the 18th century. The contributors address such themes as the extent to which to what extent urban change accelerated a redefinition of gender relations; the connections between urban growth, changing definitions of citizenship, and the emergence of the male gendered political subject; the role of women in a literate, consumer and industrializing society; the place of women's networks in the economic, political and social life of the town and the distinctive role played by women in areas such as philanthropy and business; and how the development of urban society in turn inflected contemporary conceputalizations of gender.
Stays and Body Image in London
Author: Lynn Sorge-EnglishPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317323343
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
This book fills a significant gap in the literature on eighteenth-century social and cultural history. Starting with their production and trade, Sorge-English looks at the intricacies of the staymaker’s craft, the role of gender in the design and manufacture of stays and the changing shape of stays over time.
Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812
Author: Zoë KinsleyPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
Between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, the possibilities for travelling within Britain became increasingly various owing to improved transport systems and the popularization of numerous tourist spots. Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682-1812 examines women's participation in that burgeoning touristic tradition, considering the ways in which the changing face of British travel and its writing can be traced through the accounts produced by the women who journeyed England, Scotland, and Wales during this important period. This book explores female-authored home tour travel narratives in print, as well as manuscript works that have hitherto been neglected in criticism. Discussing texts produced by authors including Celia Fiennes, Ann Radcliffe and Dorothy Wordsworth alongside the works of lesser-known travellers such as Mary Morgan and Dorothy Richardson, Kinsley considers the construction, and also the destabilization, of gender, class, and national identity through chapters that emphasize the diversity and complexity of this rich body of writings.
The Protestant Whore
Author: Alison Margaret ConwayPublisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442641371
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Protestants worried that King Charles II might favour religious freedom for Roman Catholics, and many suspected that the king was unduly influenced by his Catholic mistresses. Nell Gwyn, actress and royal mistress, stood apart by virtue of her Protestant loyalty. In 1681, Gwyn, her carriage surrounded by an angry anti-Catholic mob, famously declared 'I am the protestant whore.' Her self-branding invites an investigation into the alignment between sex and politics during this period, and in this study, Alison Conway relates courtesan narrative to cultural and religious anxieties. In new readings of canonical works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson, Conway argues that authors engaged the same questions about identity, nation, authority, literature, and politics as those pursued by Restoration polemicists. Her study reveals the recurring connection between sexual impropriety and religious heterodoxy in Restoration thought, and Nell Gwyn, writ large as the nation's Protestant Whore, is shown to be a significant figure of sexual, political, and religious controversy.
Imitation and Society
Author: Tom HuhnPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046013
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far more robust and compelling doctrines of taste and aesthetic judgment. Since the idea of mimesis was taken to apply only in the relation of art to nature, it was judged to be too limited when the focus of aesthetics changed to questions about the constitution of individual subjects in regard to taste. Tom Huhn argues that mimesis, rather than disappearing, instead became a far more pervasive idea in the eighteenth century by becoming submerged within the dynamics of the emerging accounts of judgment and taste. Mimesis also thereby became enmeshed in the ideas of sociality contained, often only implicitly, within the new accounts of aesthetic judgment. The book proceeds by reading three of the foundational treatises in aesthetics—Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—with an eye for discerning where arguments and analyses betray mimetic structures. Huhn attempts to explicate these books anew by arguing that they are pervaded by a mimetic dynamic. Overall, he seeks to provoke a reconsideration of eighteenth-century aesthetics that centers on its continuity with traditional notions of mimesis.