Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics

Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics PDF Author: Ashley Marshall
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495350
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson’s interests and the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson’s unique contribution has to do with his understanding of “seeing” and “reading” as closely related enterprises, and “popular” forms in art and literature as intimately connected—connections illustrated by literary critics and art historians here. Every essay shares some of the concerns and methods that characterize Paulson’s wonderfully idiosyncratic thought—except for the final essay, an attempt systematically to analyze Paulson’s critical principles and methods. Recurrent themes are a concern with satire in the eighteenth century; a connection between verbal and visual reading; an insistence on the importance of individual artistic choices to the history of culture; an attention to the aims and motives of individual makers of art; and a sensitivity to the crucial links between high and low art. This volume offers rich explorations of a range of subjects: Swift’s relationship to Congreve; Zoffany’s condemnation of Gillray and Hogarth, and broader implications for the role of art in public discourse; the presentation of mourning in the work of the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh; G. M. Woodward’s “Coffee-House Characters,” representing a turn from satire on morals towards satire on manners; Adam Smith’s evolving aesthetic program; Samuel Richardson’s notions of social reading. The discussions represent a variety of exemplifications of the Paulsonesque, showing a concern with satiric representation in mixed media, with different forms of heterodoxy and iconoclasm, and with the values of producers of popular and polite culture in this period.

Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics

Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics PDF Author: Ashley Marshall
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495350
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson’s interests and the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson’s unique contribution has to do with his understanding of “seeing” and “reading” as closely related enterprises, and “popular” forms in art and literature as intimately connected—connections illustrated by literary critics and art historians here. Every essay shares some of the concerns and methods that characterize Paulson’s wonderfully idiosyncratic thought—except for the final essay, an attempt systematically to analyze Paulson’s critical principles and methods. Recurrent themes are a concern with satire in the eighteenth century; a connection between verbal and visual reading; an insistence on the importance of individual artistic choices to the history of culture; an attention to the aims and motives of individual makers of art; and a sensitivity to the crucial links between high and low art. This volume offers rich explorations of a range of subjects: Swift’s relationship to Congreve; Zoffany’s condemnation of Gillray and Hogarth, and broader implications for the role of art in public discourse; the presentation of mourning in the work of the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh; G. M. Woodward’s “Coffee-House Characters,” representing a turn from satire on morals towards satire on manners; Adam Smith’s evolving aesthetic program; Samuel Richardson’s notions of social reading. The discussions represent a variety of exemplifications of the Paulsonesque, showing a concern with satiric representation in mixed media, with different forms of heterodoxy and iconoclasm, and with the values of producers of popular and polite culture in this period.

Periodizing Secularization

Periodizing Secularization PDF Author: Clive D. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192588575
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe

The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe PDF Author: Nicholas Seager
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198827172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe is the most comprehensive overview available of the author's life, times, writings, and reception. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is a major author in world literature, renowned for a succession of novels including Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A Journal of the Plague Year, but more famous in his lifetime as a poet, journalist, and political agent. Across his vast oeuvre, which includes books, pamphlets, and periodicals, Defoe commented on virtually every development and issue of his lifetime, a turbulent and transformative period in British and global history. Defoe has proven challenging to position--in some respects he is a traditional and conservative thinker, but in other ways he is a progressive and innovative writer. He therefore benefits from the range of critical appraisals offered in this Handbook. The Handbook ranges from concerns of gender, class, and race to those of politics, religion, and economics. In accessible but learned chapters, contributors explore salient contexts in ways that show how they overlap and intersect, such as in chapters on science, environment, and empire. The Handbook provides both a thorough introduction to Defoe and to early eighteenth-century society, culture, and literature more broadly. Thirty-six chapters by leading literary scholars and historians explore the various genres in which Defoe wrote; the sociocultural contexts that inform his works; his writings on different locales, from the local to the global; and the posthumous reception and creative responses to his works.

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire PDF Author: Paddy Bullard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191043710
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth-century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth-century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to the first decade of the seventeenth-century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1

Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1 PDF Author: Michael McKeon
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684484731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Reading Swift's Poetry

Reading Swift's Poetry PDF Author: Daniel Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108899102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Poets are makers, etymologically speaking. In practice, they are also thieves. Over a long career, from the early 1690s to the late 1730s, Jonathan Swift thrived on a creative tension between original poetry-making and the filching of familiar material from the poetic archive. The most extensive study of Swift's verse to appear in more than thirty years, Reading Swift's Poetry offers detailed readings of dozens of major poems, as well as neglected and recently recovered pieces. This book reaffirms Swift's prominence in competing literary traditions as diverse as the pastoral and the political, the metaphysical and the satirical, and demonstrates the persistence of unlikely literary tropes across his multifaceted career. Daniel Cook also considers the audacious ways in which Swift engages with Juvenal's satires, Horace's epistles, Milton's epics, Cowley's odes, and an astonishing array of other canonical and forgotten writers.

Swift and Others

Swift and Others PDF Author: Claude Rawson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Jonathan Swift's influence on the writings and politics of England and Ireland was reinforced by a combination of contradictory forces: an authoritarian attachment to tradition and rule, and a vivid responsiveness to the disorders of a modernity he resisted and yet helped to create. He was, perhaps even more than Pope, a dominant voice of his times. The rich variety of the literary culture to which he belonged shows the penetration of his ideas, personality and style. This is true of writers who were his friends and admirers (Pope), of adversaries (Mandeville, Johnson), of several who became great ironists in his shadow (Gibbon, Austen), and of some surprising examples of Swiftian afterlife (Chatterton). Claude Rawson, leading scholar of the works of Swift, brings together recent essays, as well as classic earlier work extensively revised, to offer fresh insights into an era when Swift's voice was a pervasive presence.

The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange

The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange PDF Author: Ronald Paulson
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421430560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Arguing that the two traditions comprised not only painterly but literary theory and practice, Paulson explores the innovations of Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith, which followed and complemented the practice in the visual arts of Hogarth and his followers.

Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century

Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: James Bryant Reeves
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108835902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Documents eighteenth-century literary representations of atheism, arguing that opposition to atheism generated unique forms of religious belief.

The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660-1696

The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660-1696 PDF Author: James Walters
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Examines how the form and function of the Covenants were shorn of religious implications and repurposed, serving a pluralistic vision of the role of religion in politics and public life. Until now, scholarship on the Covenants has mainly focussed on their role in the conflicts of the 1640s, with discussion of the Covenants after 1660 mostly limited to the context of violent Scottish radicalism. This book moves beyond a rigid focus on Scotland to explore the legacy of the Covenants in England. It examines the discourse surrounding key events in the Restoration period and traces the influence of the Covenants in the context of radical Presbyterianism, and in mainstream debates around politics, church government, and the constitution of the British kingdoms. The Covenants continued to have relevance in two primary respects. Firstly, the Covenants were used as reference points for discussing the competing legacies of the English and Scottish Reformations and the confused issues of church and state that defined the Restoration period. Furthermore, the form of the Covenants as solemn individual subscriptions to a constitutional and religious model, and the political ideas that underpinned them, were emulated by those seeking to resist royal authority during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, and during the events surrounding the Revolution of 1688. Thus, this book holds particular interest for students of constitutionalism, legal pluralism or civil religion in seventeenth-century Britain, and for those seeking to deepen their understanding of the intellectual origins of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Revolution of 1688-9.