Hannah Barker
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198207412
- eISBN:
- 9780191677663
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198207412.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
For many contemporaries in late eighteenth-century England, the influence which the press exerted over politics and public opinion was a blessing which ...
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For many contemporaries in late eighteenth-century England, the influence which the press exerted over politics and public opinion was a blessing which both prevented politicians from misusing their power and gave the people a voice. Others felt that newspapers were capable of misleading the public and creating unrest. Yet most are united in their belief that the press had a particularly powerful position in society. By stressing the commercial concerns of newspaper editors and proprietors, and by examining the links between newspapers and their readers, this book has challenged the existing historiography of the press, and emphasised the role of public opinion in determining newspaper contents.Less
For many contemporaries in late eighteenth-century England, the influence which the press exerted over politics and public opinion was a blessing which both prevented politicians from misusing their power and gave the people a voice. Others felt that newspapers were capable of misleading the public and creating unrest. Yet most are united in their belief that the press had a particularly powerful position in society. By stressing the commercial concerns of newspaper editors and proprietors, and by examining the links between newspapers and their readers, this book has challenged the existing historiography of the press, and emphasised the role of public opinion in determining newspaper contents.
Colin Podmore
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198207252
- eISBN:
- 9780191677588
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198207252.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, History of Religion
The effects of the great Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century England were felt throughout the world, not least in America. It has long been accepted that the Revival owed much of its initial ...
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The effects of the great Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century England were felt throughout the world, not least in America. It has long been accepted that the Revival owed much of its initial impetus to the Moravian Church, but previous accounts of the Moravians' role have been inadequate and overly dependent on Wesleyan sources. This book uses original material from German as well as British archives to dispel common misunderstandings about the Moravians, and to reveal that their influence was much greater than has previously been acknowledged. It discusses what motivated people to join the Church, analyses the Moravians' changing relationships with John Wesley and George Whitefield, and shows how Anglican bishops responded to the Moravians' successive ecumenical strategies. Its analysis of the successful campaign to secure state recognition (granted in 1749) sheds light on the inner workings of the Hanoverian parliament. In conclusion, the book explores how acclaim quickly turned to ridicule in a crisis of unpopularity that was to affect the Moravian Church for a generation.Less
The effects of the great Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century England were felt throughout the world, not least in America. It has long been accepted that the Revival owed much of its initial impetus to the Moravian Church, but previous accounts of the Moravians' role have been inadequate and overly dependent on Wesleyan sources. This book uses original material from German as well as British archives to dispel common misunderstandings about the Moravians, and to reveal that their influence was much greater than has previously been acknowledged. It discusses what motivated people to join the Church, analyses the Moravians' changing relationships with John Wesley and George Whitefield, and shows how Anglican bishops responded to the Moravians' successive ecumenical strategies. Its analysis of the successful campaign to secure state recognition (granted in 1749) sheds light on the inner workings of the Hanoverian parliament. In conclusion, the book explores how acclaim quickly turned to ridicule in a crisis of unpopularity that was to affect the Moravian Church for a generation.
Hannah Barker
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198207412
- eISBN:
- 9780191677663
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198207412.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Historians have traditionally attributed great influence to newspapers in late eighteenth-century England. Yet in spite of the power they were supposed to wield, very ...
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Historians have traditionally attributed great influence to newspapers in late eighteenth-century England. Yet in spite of the power they were supposed to wield, very little is known about the newspaper press itself during this period. This book examines the ways in which both London and provincial newspapers operated, the fashioning of their politics, and their relationships with politicians, and, crucially, their readers. In particular, this book is concerned with the ways in which newspapers both represented and shaped public opinion. By concentrating on the late 1770s and early 1780s, and on events and debates surrounding the movement for political reform, these areas are brought into sharper focus, as are important and related issues such as the changing nature of popular political debate, the role of ‘the people’ in politics, and the composition of the political nation.Less
Historians have traditionally attributed great influence to newspapers in late eighteenth-century England. Yet in spite of the power they were supposed to wield, very little is known about the newspaper press itself during this period. This book examines the ways in which both London and provincial newspapers operated, the fashioning of their politics, and their relationships with politicians, and, crucially, their readers. In particular, this book is concerned with the ways in which newspapers both represented and shaped public opinion. By concentrating on the late 1770s and early 1780s, and on events and debates surrounding the movement for political reform, these areas are brought into sharper focus, as are important and related issues such as the changing nature of popular political debate, the role of ‘the people’ in politics, and the composition of the political nation.
John Seed
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748621514
- eISBN:
- 9780748651306
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748621514.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, UK Politics
This book is the first major study of the historical writings of religious dissenters in England between the 1690s and the 1790s. It redefines the way we understand religious and political identities ...
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This book is the first major study of the historical writings of religious dissenters in England between the 1690s and the 1790s. It redefines the way we understand religious and political identities in the eighteenth century and provides a synoptic overview of the development of religious dissent in England between the Restoration and the early nineteenth century, using Dissenters' writings to open up new and different perspectives on how the past was perceived in this period. These writings are located within the wider political culture, and the author explores how the long shadow of ‘the Great Rebellion’ of the 1640s stretched across the division between Church and Dissent. The author is not simply concerned with history as a representation of the past, but history also as part of the bitterly divided collective memory of the present. Focusing on the relationship between the history that historians wrote, and the history which men and women experienced, the author provides the reader with new perspectives on eighteenth-century England.Less
This book is the first major study of the historical writings of religious dissenters in England between the 1690s and the 1790s. It redefines the way we understand religious and political identities in the eighteenth century and provides a synoptic overview of the development of religious dissent in England between the Restoration and the early nineteenth century, using Dissenters' writings to open up new and different perspectives on how the past was perceived in this period. These writings are located within the wider political culture, and the author explores how the long shadow of ‘the Great Rebellion’ of the 1640s stretched across the division between Church and Dissent. The author is not simply concerned with history as a representation of the past, but history also as part of the bitterly divided collective memory of the present. Focusing on the relationship between the history that historians wrote, and the history which men and women experienced, the author provides the reader with new perspectives on eighteenth-century England.
Emma Griffin
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263211
- eISBN:
- 9780191734427
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263211.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This chapter attempts to establish the extent of concern for animal suffering during eighteenth-century England. An intellectual history of this sport is provided. It looks at the rapid emergence of ...
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This chapter attempts to establish the extent of concern for animal suffering during eighteenth-century England. An intellectual history of this sport is provided. It looks at the rapid emergence of hostile criticism about bull-baiting in the late eighteenth-century. The chapter also attempts to situate the outpouring of concern within the wider context of concern about animal cruelty.Less
This chapter attempts to establish the extent of concern for animal suffering during eighteenth-century England. An intellectual history of this sport is provided. It looks at the rapid emergence of hostile criticism about bull-baiting in the late eighteenth-century. The chapter also attempts to situate the outpouring of concern within the wider context of concern about animal cruelty.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter explores how the idea of the novel as a cultural experience of novelty emerged concurrently with its solidification as a literary medium. That the global origins of England's early ...
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This chapter explores how the idea of the novel as a cultural experience of novelty emerged concurrently with its solidification as a literary medium. That the global origins of England's early market culture share the same exotic background as Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet's history of prose fiction in his influential Treatise on Romance indicates that novelty in eighteenth-century lives comprised as much an act of consuming strange things as reading them. Both cultural phenomenon and textual artifact, the novel introduced experiences of metamorphoses through staging encounters with alterity. Perhaps no other narrative exemplifies the entwined conditions of experiencing novelty and novel writing than Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). The chapter also investigates how, as novelty's recurring partner, fashion operated as a powerful agent for fictions of eighteenth-century British subjectivity, and was regarded as the age of Enlightenment's own fetish.Less
This chapter explores how the idea of the novel as a cultural experience of novelty emerged concurrently with its solidification as a literary medium. That the global origins of England's early market culture share the same exotic background as Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet's history of prose fiction in his influential Treatise on Romance indicates that novelty in eighteenth-century lives comprised as much an act of consuming strange things as reading them. Both cultural phenomenon and textual artifact, the novel introduced experiences of metamorphoses through staging encounters with alterity. Perhaps no other narrative exemplifies the entwined conditions of experiencing novelty and novel writing than Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). The chapter also investigates how, as novelty's recurring partner, fashion operated as a powerful agent for fictions of eighteenth-century British subjectivity, and was regarded as the age of Enlightenment's own fetish.
Patricia Spacks
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226768601
- eISBN:
- 9780226768618
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226768618.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one ...
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Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. This book explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. The book examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. It considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, the book explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, the book shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.Less
Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. This book explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. The book examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. It considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, the book explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, the book shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter argues that the complex fascination with dolls in eighteenth-century culture—both life-size and smaller—held implications in constructing the female subject as a mimetic, self-suspended ...
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This chapter argues that the complex fascination with dolls in eighteenth-century culture—both life-size and smaller—held implications in constructing the female subject as a mimetic, self-suspended in a state of perpetual desire. At the same time at which the English novel was further developing its tradition of “formal realism,” the growing preoccupation with dolls in popular entertainment reflects a more general trend toward a culture of realism, and toward fulfilling the desire for re-creating “true” consciousness and “true” being through artifacts. Dolls also functioned as figurative and literal models for eighteenth-century women, whose close readings of novels, conduct books, and fashion plates alike conditioned them to desire being another. In emulating fashion dolls, eighteenth-century women imitated objects already made to look human—and feminine.Less
This chapter argues that the complex fascination with dolls in eighteenth-century culture—both life-size and smaller—held implications in constructing the female subject as a mimetic, self-suspended in a state of perpetual desire. At the same time at which the English novel was further developing its tradition of “formal realism,” the growing preoccupation with dolls in popular entertainment reflects a more general trend toward a culture of realism, and toward fulfilling the desire for re-creating “true” consciousness and “true” being through artifacts. Dolls also functioned as figurative and literal models for eighteenth-century women, whose close readings of novels, conduct books, and fashion plates alike conditioned them to desire being another. In emulating fashion dolls, eighteenth-century women imitated objects already made to look human—and feminine.
Julie Park
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there ...
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Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called “the novel” that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. The author of this book makes an intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, the book revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. It demonstrates just how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of “artificial life”—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.Less
Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called “the novel” that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. The author of this book makes an intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, the book revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. It demonstrates just how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of “artificial life”—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.
Donna T. Andrew
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300184334
- eISBN:
- 9780300185522
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300184334.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This book examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: dueling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. It also discusses ...
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This book examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: dueling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. It also discusses how it was commonly believed that all four owed their origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish perpetrators when they were members of the elite. The book explores each vice's treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of “class superiority” among the soon-to-emerge British middle class.Less
This book examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: dueling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. It also discusses how it was commonly believed that all four owed their origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish perpetrators when they were members of the elite. The book explores each vice's treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of “class superiority” among the soon-to-emerge British middle class.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This concluding chapter considers Freud as an epiphenomenon of the eighteenth century. Through invoking Freud as a secondary symptom of the eighteenth century that in turn accompanies our reading of ...
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This concluding chapter considers Freud as an epiphenomenon of the eighteenth century. Through invoking Freud as a secondary symptom of the eighteenth century that in turn accompanies our reading of the period, the age of Enlightenment and its most enduring attitudes become more sharply defined. By tracing the trope of enlightenment in Freud and its ineluctable associations with eighteenth-century methods and instruments of Enlightenment, it is shown that the ideas and visions of the eighteenth century remain very much with us as post-Freudian subjects. The use of “enlightenment” contrasts with “Enlightenment.” The former denotes the metaphorical process of clarification and mental understanding that falls out of the historical framework of the “age of Enlightenment” yet is greatly indebted to its ideas. The latter refers to the intellectual movement—self-consciously aware of itself as such—that reached its height of vigor and concentration in the eighteenth century.Less
This concluding chapter considers Freud as an epiphenomenon of the eighteenth century. Through invoking Freud as a secondary symptom of the eighteenth century that in turn accompanies our reading of the period, the age of Enlightenment and its most enduring attitudes become more sharply defined. By tracing the trope of enlightenment in Freud and its ineluctable associations with eighteenth-century methods and instruments of Enlightenment, it is shown that the ideas and visions of the eighteenth century remain very much with us as post-Freudian subjects. The use of “enlightenment” contrasts with “Enlightenment.” The former denotes the metaphorical process of clarification and mental understanding that falls out of the historical framework of the “age of Enlightenment” yet is greatly indebted to its ideas. The latter refers to the intellectual movement—self-consciously aware of itself as such—that reached its height of vigor and concentration in the eighteenth century.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Frances Burney' novels—Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796), in particular—focus on the period in women's lives as they move from childhood into adult life and present themselves ...
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Frances Burney' novels—Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796), in particular—focus on the period in women's lives as they move from childhood into adult life and present themselves formally to “the world.” For Burney's characters and herself as a published writer, coming out entails a compulsive identification with the automaton—a model of mimesis and regularity that appeared persistently in eighteenth-century conduct literature and social life. This chapter discusses how depicting such processes of mechanical identification paradoxically grant Burney's protagonists affective range, as well as promote the aesthetic force and technical innovation of her novels. When presenting women as automata, Burney deploys the novel medium for detailing the possibilities of generating individual affect within the very confines of the mechanized subjectivity that appears to limit the depth of female expression.Less
Frances Burney' novels—Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796), in particular—focus on the period in women's lives as they move from childhood into adult life and present themselves formally to “the world.” For Burney's characters and herself as a published writer, coming out entails a compulsive identification with the automaton—a model of mimesis and regularity that appeared persistently in eighteenth-century conduct literature and social life. This chapter discusses how depicting such processes of mechanical identification paradoxically grant Burney's protagonists affective range, as well as promote the aesthetic force and technical innovation of her novels. When presenting women as automata, Burney deploys the novel medium for detailing the possibilities of generating individual affect within the very confines of the mechanized subjectivity that appears to limit the depth of female expression.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter examines the relationship between eighteenth-century affect and object relations by considering the story of sexual fetishism in Richardson's Clarissa (1747–1748) as a symptom of both ...
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This chapter examines the relationship between eighteenth-century affect and object relations by considering the story of sexual fetishism in Richardson's Clarissa (1747–1748) as a symptom of both libertine and novelistic ambitions. By obsessively acquiring objects and evidence of “true” feminine presence, both Richardson and the libertine character he invents register the fear of absence that threatens cultural and individual investments in surfaces and other material artifacts of being. This secret thread of fetishism running throughout Richardson's moralistic novel intersects with the eighteenth-century model of sensibility as a social presentation of emotions. Tracing the fetishistic strains of Richardson's novel illuminates the sexually constructivist properties of the novel of sensibility, and in turn, the affective and moral significance of fetishism. The extraordinary increase of letters, sentiments, and tears in Clarissa serves as the memorial to masculine creativity in its efforts to fill in the fissures and holes of everyday—and modern—life.Less
This chapter examines the relationship between eighteenth-century affect and object relations by considering the story of sexual fetishism in Richardson's Clarissa (1747–1748) as a symptom of both libertine and novelistic ambitions. By obsessively acquiring objects and evidence of “true” feminine presence, both Richardson and the libertine character he invents register the fear of absence that threatens cultural and individual investments in surfaces and other material artifacts of being. This secret thread of fetishism running throughout Richardson's moralistic novel intersects with the eighteenth-century model of sensibility as a social presentation of emotions. Tracing the fetishistic strains of Richardson's novel illuminates the sexually constructivist properties of the novel of sensibility, and in turn, the affective and moral significance of fetishism. The extraordinary increase of letters, sentiments, and tears in Clarissa serves as the memorial to masculine creativity in its efforts to fill in the fissures and holes of everyday—and modern—life.
Craig Calhoun
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226090849
- eISBN:
- 9780226090870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226090870.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
In eighteenth-century England, public opinion emerged as an important force that government had to contend with and to which politicians were obligated to listen. There were struggles not only about ...
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In eighteenth-century England, public opinion emerged as an important force that government had to contend with and to which politicians were obligated to listen. There were struggles not only about which ideas would dominate in the public sphere, but who could speak and what could be said. According to Jürgen Habermas, the political public sphere occupies a central role as an institutional formation—and an ideal—underlying democracy. This chapter examines the idea of the public sphere in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers how the dominant political public was shaped by exclusion of the most extremely dissident voices and the extent to which “counterpublics” may accommodate failures of larger public spheres. Finally, the chapter discusses radical politics and the limits of elite radicalism.Less
In eighteenth-century England, public opinion emerged as an important force that government had to contend with and to which politicians were obligated to listen. There were struggles not only about which ideas would dominate in the public sphere, but who could speak and what could be said. According to Jürgen Habermas, the political public sphere occupies a central role as an institutional formation—and an ideal—underlying democracy. This chapter examines the idea of the public sphere in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers how the dominant political public was shaped by exclusion of the most extremely dissident voices and the extent to which “counterpublics” may accommodate failures of larger public spheres. Finally, the chapter discusses radical politics and the limits of elite radicalism.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter proposes that a poetics of puppetry in eighteenth-century England informed not just textual productions of narrative, but also the ability for narrative to reconstruct the human subject ...
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This chapter proposes that a poetics of puppetry in eighteenth-century England informed not just textual productions of narrative, but also the ability for narrative to reconstruct the human subject as a character to create and manipulate across the page. Nowhere does the model of the puppet theater play such a pivotal role in subject formation and narration as A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). Charke's account of her strange and madcap life, with its serial mutations and fabrications of identity, foregrounds and incorporates these traits of the puppet and puppet theater, not least in its own mediation through a narrative that curiously foreshortens the subject's own interiority and equivocates her sexuality. Though Charke worked as a puppeteer only momentarily in her life, the procedure of her narrative remains indebted to a technique practiced specifically in the puppet theater: emitting a “personal” voice through material distinct from its original body.Less
This chapter proposes that a poetics of puppetry in eighteenth-century England informed not just textual productions of narrative, but also the ability for narrative to reconstruct the human subject as a character to create and manipulate across the page. Nowhere does the model of the puppet theater play such a pivotal role in subject formation and narration as A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). Charke's account of her strange and madcap life, with its serial mutations and fabrications of identity, foregrounds and incorporates these traits of the puppet and puppet theater, not least in its own mediation through a narrative that curiously foreshortens the subject's own interiority and equivocates her sexuality. Though Charke worked as a puppeteer only momentarily in her life, the procedure of her narrative remains indebted to a technique practiced specifically in the puppet theater: emitting a “personal” voice through material distinct from its original body.
Geoffrey Clark
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226035185
- eISBN:
- 9780226035178
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226035178.003.0004
- Subject:
- Law, Company and Commercial Law
This chapter takes a historical look at the role of gambling and virtue in the development of the modern insurance regime. It examines how insurance grew hand-in-hand with gambling, arguing that the ...
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This chapter takes a historical look at the role of gambling and virtue in the development of the modern insurance regime. It examines how insurance grew hand-in-hand with gambling, arguing that the business of insurance actually stimulated the speculative passions as much as it depressed risk taking. The chapter demonstrates that the culture of risk management epitomized by life insurance emerged not so much from an attempt to banish risks as to play with them. In the process, the chapter analyzes how risk sometimes is both individualized and socialized. It discusses how life insurance simultaneously enabled families to protect themselves against financial disaster, and promoted continuity and autonomy in the larger commercial society.Less
This chapter takes a historical look at the role of gambling and virtue in the development of the modern insurance regime. It examines how insurance grew hand-in-hand with gambling, arguing that the business of insurance actually stimulated the speculative passions as much as it depressed risk taking. The chapter demonstrates that the culture of risk management epitomized by life insurance emerged not so much from an attempt to banish risks as to play with them. In the process, the chapter analyzes how risk sometimes is both individualized and socialized. It discusses how life insurance simultaneously enabled families to protect themselves against financial disaster, and promoted continuity and autonomy in the larger commercial society.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758772
- eISBN:
- 9780804769792
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758772.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter shows that Jonathan Swift remained profoundly committed to safeguarding religion's place in the social and political institutions of eighteenth-century England. In Swift's various ...
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This chapter shows that Jonathan Swift remained profoundly committed to safeguarding religion's place in the social and political institutions of eighteenth-century England. In Swift's various writings on religion, fictional and nonfictional, one can see the full bloom for the English Enlightenment of religion's status as a pious fraud, a strategy that was crucially informed, once again, by a theory of religion rooted in ancient theology. This discussion explores how A Tale of the Tub succeeds in upholding the teachings of the Anglican Church.Less
This chapter shows that Jonathan Swift remained profoundly committed to safeguarding religion's place in the social and political institutions of eighteenth-century England. In Swift's various writings on religion, fictional and nonfictional, one can see the full bloom for the English Enlightenment of religion's status as a pious fraud, a strategy that was crucially informed, once again, by a theory of religion rooted in ancient theology. This discussion explores how A Tale of the Tub succeeds in upholding the teachings of the Anglican Church.
