Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century

Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Veronica Kelly
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476638X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Twelve scholars from the fields of English, French, and German literature here examine the complex ways in which the human body becomes the privileged semiotic model through which eighteenth-century culture defines its political and conceptual centers. In making clear that the deployment of the body varies tremendously depending on what is meant by the 'human body', the essays draw on popular literature, poetics and aesthetics, garden architecture, physiognomy, beauty manuals, pornography and philosophy, as well as on canonical works in the genres of the novel and the drama.

Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century

Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Veronica Kelly
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476638X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Twelve scholars from the fields of English, French, and German literature here examine the complex ways in which the human body becomes the privileged semiotic model through which eighteenth-century culture defines its political and conceptual centers. In making clear that the deployment of the body varies tremendously depending on what is meant by the 'human body', the essays draw on popular literature, poetics and aesthetics, garden architecture, physiognomy, beauty manuals, pornography and philosophy, as well as on canonical works in the genres of the novel and the drama.

Shapely Bodies

Shapely Bodies PDF Author: Christine A. Jones
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644530740
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, stylish patterns, and accessories. These practices crossed paths in the work of artisans, whose luxury objects reflected and also influenced the curves of fashion in the eighteenth century. French artisans began trials to reproduce fine Chinese porcelain in the 1660s. The challenge proved impossible until they found an essential ingredient, kaolin, in French soil in the 1760s. Shapely Bodies differs from other studies of French porcelain in that it does not begin in the 1760s at the Sèvres manufactory when it became technically possible to produce fine porcelain in France, but instead ends there. Without the secret of Chinese porcelain, artisans in France turned to radical forms of experimentation. Over the first half of the eighteenth century, they invented artificial alternatives to Chinese porcelain, decorated them with French style, and, with equal determination, shaped an identity for their new trade that distanced it from traditional guild-crafts and aligned it with scientific invention. The back story of porcelain making before kaolin provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of artisanal innovation and cultural mythmaking. To write artificial porcelain into a history of “real” porcelain dominated by China, Japan, and Meissen in Saxony, French porcelainiers learned to describe their new commodity in language that tapped into national pride and the mythic power of French savoir faire. Artificial porcelain cut such a fashionable image that by the mid-eighteenth century, Louis XV appropriated it for the glory of the crown. When the monarchy ended, revolutionaries reclaimed French porcelain, the fruit of a century of artisanal labor, for the Republic. Tracking how the porcelain arts were depicted in documents and visual arts during one hundred years of experimentation, Shapely Bodies reveals the politics behind the making of French porcelain’s image. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The Eighteenth-century Body

The Eighteenth-century Body PDF Author: Angelica Goodden
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The papers collected in this volume are selected from the proceedings of a conference held at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 2001. The eighteenth century - an age of empiricism - saw understanding the body as central to the science of man. In medicine, literature and the arts the theme of corporeality focused debates about «correct» human responses, expressing emotion, representing beauty and cultivating relationships. These papers set out to examine how the body came to the fore as communicative medium, hygienic complex and object of artistic as well as scientific investigation and literary presentation.

Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England

Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Soile Ylivuori
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429845693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This first in-depth study of women’s politeness examines the complex relationship individuals had with the discursive ideals of polite femininity. Contextualising women’s autobiographical writings (journals and letters) with a wide range of eighteenth-century printed didactic material, it analyses the tensions between politeness discourse which aimed to regulate acceptable feminine identities and women’s possibilities to resist this disciplinary regime. Ylivuori focuses on the central role the female body played as both the means through which individuals actively fashioned themselves as polite and feminine, and the supposedly truthful expression of their inner status of polite femininity.

Mind and Body in Eighteenth Century Medicine

Mind and Body in Eighteenth Century Medicine PDF Author: L. J. Rather
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description


Colonial Complexions

Colonial Complexions PDF Author: Sharon Block
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250060
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
How did descriptions of individuals' appearance reinforce emergent categories of race? In Colonial Complexions, more than 4000 advertisements for runaway slaves and servants reveal how colonists transformed seemingly observable characteristics into racist reality.

Revealing Bodies

Revealing Bodies PDF Author: Erin Goss
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611483948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly one's own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's cosmological depiction of the body's origin in such works as The First] Book of Urizen, and Mary Tighe's reflection on the relation between love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love demonstrate that the idea of the body that grounds knowledge in an understanding of anatomy emerges not as fact but as fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies describes how thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and bodily exhibitions in the twentieth and twenty-first call upon allegorized figurations of the body to conceal the absence of any other available means to understand that which is uniquely our own: our existence as bodies in the world.

Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden PDF Author: Jacqueline Van Gent
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004171142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Contrary to previous assumptions, magic remained an integral part of everyday life in Enlightenment Europe. This book demonstrates that the endurance of magical practices, both benevolent and malevolent, was grounded in early modern perceptions of an interconnected body, self and spiritual cosmos. Drawing on eighteenth-century Swedish witchcraft trials, which are exceptionally detailed, these notions of embodiment and selfhood are explored in depth. The nuanced analysis of healing magic, the role of emotions, the politics of evidence and proof and the very ambiguity of magical rituals reveals a surprising syncretism of Christian and pre-Christian elements. The book provides a unique insight to the history of magic and witchcraft, the study of eighteenth-century religion and culture, and to our understanding of body and self in the past.

The Woman Beneath the Skin

The Woman Beneath the Skin PDF Author: Barbara Duden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674954045
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms that we use to describe our own bodies--male and female, healthy or sick--are cultural constructions. To illustrate this, she delves into records of an 18th-century German physician who documented the medical histories of 1,800 women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words.

Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire PDF Author: J. Batchelor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230508200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.