The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Linda Zionkowski
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes the long overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts and cultural documents and provides innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.

The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Linda Zionkowski
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes the long overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts and cultural documents and provides innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.

The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: C. Klekar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230618413
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes the long overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts and cultural documents and provides innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.

Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: Linda Zionkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317240472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

The Making of the Modern Self

The Making of the Modern Self PDF Author: Dror Wahrman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300102518
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Wahrman argues that toward the end of the 18th century there was a radical change in notions of self & personal identity - a sudden transformation that was a revolution in the understanding of selfhood & of identity categories including race, gender, & class.

Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness

Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness PDF Author: Lawrence E. Klein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521418062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The third Earl of Shaftesbury was a pivotal figure in eighteenth-century thought and culture. Professor Klein's study is the first to examine the extensive Shaftesbury manuscripts and offer an interpretation of his diverse writings as an attempt to comprehend contemporary society and politics and, in particular, to offer a legitimation for the new Whig political order established after 1688. As the focus of Shaftesbury's thinking was the idea of politeness, this study involves the first serious examination of the importance of the idea of politeness in the eighteenth century for thinking about society and culture and organising cultural practices. Through politeness, Shaftesbury conceptualised a new kind of public and critical culture for Britain and Europe, and greatly influenced the philosophical and cultural models associated with the European Enlightenment.

Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England

Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Philip Ayres
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521584906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This book looks at the aristocratic adoption of Roman ideals in eighteenth-century English culture.

Culture in Eighteenth-Century England

Culture in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852855345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
He also shows the different currents at work, belying any simple picture of England and the English as confident and self-assured."--BOOK JACKET.

Smell in Eighteenth-Century England

Smell in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: William Tullett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192582453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny, and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell's emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odour a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them, from paint and perfume to onions and farts. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, Tullett demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell's asocial-sociability, and its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society.

The Pleasures of the Imagination

The Pleasures of the Imagination PDF Author: John Brewer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113591236X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English "high culture" in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.

Performing China

Performing China PDF Author: Chi-ming Yang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and social importance developed in the changing economic climate of the period. She highlights the ways in which English understandings of Eastern values transformed these morals. The book is organized by type of performance—theatrical, ethnographic, and literary—and by performances of gender, identity fraud, and religious conversion. In her analysis of these works, Yang brings to light surprising connections between figures as disparate as Confucius and a Chinese Amazon and between cultural norms as far removed as Hindu reincarnation and London coffeehouse culture. Part of a new wave of cross-disciplinary scholarship, where Chinese studies meets the British eighteenth century, this novel work will appeal to scholars in a number of fields, including performance studies, East Asian studies, British literature, cultural history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.