Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-century Britain

Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-century Britain PDF Author: John T. Lynch
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754665281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. While taking up the critical philosophical questions surrounding fraud, Lynch shows that fakery takes us to the heart of eighteenth-century values as they relate to evidence, perception and memory, the relationship between art and life, historicism, and human motivation.

Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-century Britain

Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-century Britain PDF Author: John T. Lynch
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754665281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. While taking up the critical philosophical questions surrounding fraud, Lynch shows that fakery takes us to the heart of eighteenth-century values as they relate to evidence, perception and memory, the relationship between art and life, historicism, and human motivation.

The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England

The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: David Porter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521192994
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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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.

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Jack Lynch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192513605
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson—essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.

The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson

The Reformist Ideas of Samuel Johnson PDF Author: Stefka Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443879126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book explores what remains an under-studied aspect of Samuel Johnson’s profile as a person and writer – namely, his attitude to social improvement. The interpretive framework provided here is cross-disciplinary, and applies perspectives from social and cultural history, legal history, architectural history and, of course, English literature. This allows Johnson’s writings to be read against the peculiarities of their historical milieu, and reveals Johnson in a new light – as an advocate of social improvement for human betterment. Considering the multiplicity of narrative modes that have been employed, the book points to the blurred boundaries and overlapping between history, testimony and fiction, and argues that a future biography of Samuel Johnson has to recognise that throughout his life he valued the utilitarian aspect of his manifesto as a writer to impart a more charitable attitude in the pursuit of a more caring society.

1650-1850

1650-1850 PDF Author: Kevin L. Cope
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684481724
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines literature, philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences.

Counterfactual Romanticism

Counterfactual Romanticism PDF Author: Damian Walford Davies
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526108011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.

Dead Famous

Dead Famous PDF Author: Greg Jenner
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 0297869817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
'Fizzes with clever vignettes and juicy tidbits... [a] joyous romp of a book.' Guardian 'A fascinating, rollicking book in search of why, where and how fame strikes. Sit back and enjoy the ride.' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads '[An] engaging and well-researched book... Jenner brings his material to vivid life' Observer Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. Whether it was the scandalous Lord Byron, whose poetry sent female fans into an erotic frenzy; or the cheetah-owning, coffin-sleeping, one-legged French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who launched a violent feud with her former best friend; or Edmund Kean, the dazzling Shakespearean actor whose monstrous ego and terrible alcoholism saw him nearly murdered by his own audience - the list of stars whose careers burned bright before the Age of Television is extensive and thrillingly varied. In this ambitious history, that spans the Bronze Age to the coming of Hollywood's Golden Age, Greg Jenner assembles a vibrant cast of over 125 actors, singers, dancers, sportspeople, freaks, demigods, ruffians, and more, in search of celebrity's historical roots. He reveals why celebrity burst into life in the early eighteenth century, how it differs to ancient ideas of fame, the techniques through which it was acquired, how it was maintained, the effect it had on public tastes, and the psychological burden stardom could place on those in the glaring limelight. DEAD FAMOUS is a surprising, funny, and fascinating exploration of both a bygone age and how we came to inhabit our modern, fame obsessed society.

Georgian London

Georgian London PDF Author: Lucy Inglis
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0670920150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
In Georgian London: Into the Streets, Lucy Inglis takes readers on a tour of London's most formative age - the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition and fantastic ruin. Travel back to the Georgian years, a time that changed expectations of what life could be. Peek into the gilded drawing rooms of the aristocracy, walk down the quiet avenues of the new middle class, and crouch in the damp doorways of the poor. But watch your wallet - tourists make perfect prey for the thriving community of hawkers, prostitutes and scavengers. Visit the madhouses of Hackney, the workshops of Soho and the mean streets of Cheapside. Have a coffee in the city, check the stock exchange, and pop into St Paul's to see progress on the new dome. This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and artists to rent boys and hot air balloonists meeting dog-nappers and life-models along the way. It investigates the legacies they left us in architecture and art, science and society, and shows the making of the capital millions know and love today. 'Read and be amazed by a city you thought you knew' Jonathan Foyle, World Monuments Fund 'Jam-packed with unusual insights and facts. A great read from a talented new historian' Independent 'Pacy, superbly researched. The real sparkle lies in its relentless cavalcade of insightful anecdotes . . . There's much to treasure here' Londonist 'Inglis has a good ear for the outlandish, the farcical, the bizarre and the macabre. A wonderful popular history of Hanoverian London' London Historians

Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen PDF Author: Dexter Palmer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525432736
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In 1726, in the town of Godalming, England, a woman confounded the nation’s medical community by giving birth to seventeen rabbits. This astonishing true story is the basis for Dexter Palmer’s stunning, powerfully evocative new novel. Surgeon’s apprentice Zachary Walsh knows that his master, John Howard, prides himself on his rationality. But John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event be­comes a regular occurrence, John and Zach­ary realize that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared them to deal with a situation like this—strange, troubling, and possibly miraculous. John contacts sev­eral of London’s finest surgeons, three of whom soon arrive in Godalming to observe, argue, and perhaps use the case to cultivate their own fame. When King George I learns of Mary’s plight, she and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences a world far removed from his small-town ex­istence and is exposed to some of the dark­est corners of the human soul. All the while Mary lies in bed, as doubts begin to blossom among her caretakers and a growing group of onlookers waits with impatience for an­other birth, another miracle.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism PDF Author: Joanne Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191648272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 709

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Book Description
In 1859, the historian Lord John Acton asserted: 'two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages'. The influence on Victorian culture of the 'Middle Ages' (broadly understood then as the centuries between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance) was both pervasive and multi-faceted. This 'medievalism' led, for instance, to the rituals and ornament of the Medieval Catholic church being reintroduced to Anglicanism. It led to the Saxon Witan being celebrated as a prototypical representative parliament. It resulted in Viking raiders being acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy. And it encouraged innumerable nineteenth-century men to cultivate the superlative beards we now think of as typically 'Victorian'—in an attempt to emulate their Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Different facets of medieval life, and different periods before the Renaissance, were utilized in nineteenth-century Britain for divergent political and cultural agendas. Medievalism also became a dominant mode in Victorian art and architecture, with 75 per cent of churches in England built on a Gothic rather than a classical model. And it was pervasive in a wide variety of literary forms, from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse to triple-decker novels. Medievalism even transformed nineteenth-century domesticity: while only a minority added moats and portcullises to their homes, the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris and Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism is the first work to examine in full the fascinating phenomenon of 'medievalism' in Victorian Britain. Covering art, architecture, religion, literature, politics, music, and social reform, the Handbook also surveys earlier forms of antiquarianism that established the groundwork for Victorian movements. In addition, this collection addresses the international context, by mapping the spread of medievalism across Europe, South America, and India, amongst other places.