Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Robert W. Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521593267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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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

Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Robert W. Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521593267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The concept of beauty in the eighteenth century, explored through philosophical texts, novels and art.

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 PDF Author: John Styles
Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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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.

The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing

The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing PDF Author: James Noggle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191635669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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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.

Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe PDF Author: Heidi A. Strobel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351558870
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.

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.

Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England

Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Rosemary Sweet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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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.

Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-century Art and Culture

Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-century Art and Culture PDF Author: Gillian Perry
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719042287
Category : Arts, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Focusing on the visual arts and written texts, this book explores the nature of femininity and masculinity in 18th-century Britain and France. The activities and collective conditions of women as producers of art and culture are investigated, together with analysis of representation and the ways in which it might be gendered. This illustrated book should make an important contribution to debates on representation, constructions of sexuality and women as producers.

Gender in Eighteenth-century England

Gender in Eighteenth-century England PDF Author: Hannah Barker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This important collection of essays draws together exciting new historical research on gender in eighteenth-century England. The book examines the experiences of women and men in public and private life and challenges the generally accepted belief that the eighteenth century saw the establishment of sexually segregated separate spheres.

A Taste for China

A Taste for China PDF Author: Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199950997
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

Disability in Eighteenth-Century England

Disability in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: David M. Turner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136304231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of physical disability in eighteenth-century England. It assesses the ways in which meanings of physical difference were formed within different cultural contexts, and examines how disabled men and women used, appropriated, or rejected these representations in making sense of their own experiences. In the process, it asks a series of related questions: what constituted ‘disability’ in eighteenth-century culture and society? How was impairment perceived? How did people with disabilities see themselves and relate to others? What do their stories tell us about the social and cultural contexts of disability, and in what ways were these narratives and experiences shaped by class and gender? In order to answer these questions, the book explores the languages of disability, the relationship between religious and medical discourses of disability, and analyzes depictions of people with disabilities in popular culture, art, and the media. It also uncovers the ‘hidden histories’ of disabled men and women themselves drawing on elite letters and autobiographies, Poor Law documents and criminal court records. The book won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Prize in 2012 for the best book published worldwide in disability history and also inspired parts of the Radio 4 series, ‘Disability: A New History’, on which the author was historical adviser. The series gained 2.6 million listeners when it first aired in 2013.