The Gothic Bequest

The Gothic Bequest PDF Author: R. J. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the use of medieval precedent in political and ecclesiastical debate during the period between the Revolution of 1688 and the mid-nineteenth-century reforms that ultimately made the tradition of historical apologetic obsolete. The book will appeal to those concerned with historiography and political theory, and to those interested in the intellectual history, secular and religious, of those years.

The Gothic Bequest

The Gothic Bequest PDF Author: R. J. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521893695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the use of medieval precedent in political and ecclesiastical debate during the period between the Revolution of 1688 and the mid-nineteenth-century reforms that ultimately made the tradition of historical apologetic obsolete. The book will appeal to those concerned with historiography and political theory, and to those interested in the intellectual history, secular and religious, of those years.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism PDF Author: Joanne Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191648264
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Get Book Here

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.

The Importance of Feeling English

The Importance of Feeling English PDF Author: Leonard Tennenhouse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171270
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Get Book Here

Book Description
American literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.

Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland's Past c. 1825-1875

Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland's Past c. 1825-1875 PDF Author: Richard A. Marsden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317159152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned? The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives. Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century. This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.

The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto PDF Author: Horace Walpole
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198704445
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
After the death of his only son on his wedding day, Manfred, the Prince of Otranto, determines to marry the bride-to-be, setting himself on a course of destruction.

Boss Ladies, Watch Out!

Boss Ladies, Watch Out! PDF Author: Terry Castle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135225281
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new collection of essays on literature and sexuality by one of the wittiest and most iconoclastic critics writing today.

British Identities before Nationalism

British Identities before Nationalism PDF Author: Colin Kidd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139425722
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Inspired by debates among political scientists over the strength and depth of the pre-modern roots of nationalism, this study attempts to gauge the status of ethnic identities in an era whose dominant loyalties and modes of political argument were confessional, institutional and juridical. Colin Kidd's point of departure is the widely shared orthodox belief that the whole world had been peopled by the offspring of Noah. In addition, Kidd probes inconsistencies in national myths of origin and ancient constitutional claims, and considers points of contact which existed in the early modern era between ethnic identities which are now viewed as antithetical, including those of Celts and Saxons. He also argues that Gothicism qualified the notorious Francophobia of eighteenth-century Britons. A wide-ranging example of the new British history, this study draws upon evidence from England, Scotland, Ireland and America, while remaining alert to European comparisons and influences.

The Language of Liberty 1660-1832

The Language of Liberty 1660-1832 PDF Author: J. C. D. Clark
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521449571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book creates a new framework for the political and intellectual relations between the British Isles and America in a momentous period which witnessed the formation of modern states on both sides of the Atlantic and the extinction of an Anglican, aristocratic and monarchical order. Jonathan Clark integrates evidence from law and religion to reveal how the dynamics of early modern societies were essentially denominational. In a study of British and American discourse, he shows how rival conceptions of liberty were expressed in the conflicts created by Protestant dissent's hostility to an Anglican hegemony. The book argues that this model provides a key to collective acts of resistance to the established order throughout the period. The book's final section focuses on the defining episode for British and American history, and shows the way in which the American Revolution can be understood as a war of religion.

Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689-1815

Masculinity, Militarism and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689-1815 PDF Author: Julia Banister
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book discusses the nature of masculinity in eighteenth-century literature and culture through the figure of the military man.

Freedom's Empire

Freedom's Empire PDF Author: Laura Doyle
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388731
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 593

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this pathbreaking work of scholarship, Laura Doyle reveals the central, formative role of race in the development of a transnational, English-language literature over three centuries. Identifying a recurring freedom plot organized around an Atlantic Ocean crossing, Doyle shows how this plot structures the texts of both African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic writers and how it takes shape by way of submerged intertextual exchanges between the two traditions. For Anglo-Atlantic writers, Doyle locates the origins of this narrative in the seventeenth century. She argues that members of Parliament, religious refugees, and new Atlantic merchants together generated a racial rhetoric by which the English fashioned themselves as a “native,” “freedom-loving,” “Anglo-Saxon” people struggling against a tyrannical foreign king. Stories of a near ruinous yet triumphant Atlantic passage to freedom came to provide the narrative expression of this heroic Anglo-Saxon identity—in novels, memoirs, pamphlets, and national histories. At the same time, as Doyle traces through figures such as Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and through gothic and seduction narratives of ruin and captivity, these texts covertly register, distort, or appropriate the black Atlantic experience. African-Atlantic authors seize back the freedom plot, placing their agency at the origin of both their own and whites’ survival on the Atlantic. They also shrewdly expose the ways that their narratives have been “framed” by the Anglo-Atlantic tradition, even though their labor has provided the enabling condition for that tradition. Doyle brings together authors often separated by nation, race, and period, including Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson, Pauline Hopkins, George Eliot, and Nella Larsen. In so doing, she reassesses the strategies of early women novelists, reinterprets the significance of rape and incest in the novel, and measures the power of race in the modern English-language imagination.