The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England

The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England PDF Author: Paula R. Backscheider
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135215251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary, useful in understanding human experience and social phenomena, gendered and perhaps "natural". Taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.

The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England

The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England PDF Author: Paula R. Backscheider
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135215251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary, useful in understanding human experience and social phenomena, gendered and perhaps "natural". Taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.

The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England

The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England PDF Author: Paula R. Backscheider
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714642758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The public and private spheres are conceived to be separate and complementary; taking the usefulness of this model as a focus, these essays ask how the spheres interpenetrate.

Caritas

Caritas PDF Author: Katie Barclay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Caritas, a form of grace that turned our love for our neighbour into a spiritual practice, was expected of all early modern Christians, and corresponded with a set of ethical rules for living that displayed one's love in the everyday. Caritas was not just a willingness to behave morally, to keep the peace, and to uphold social order however, but was expected to be felt as a strong passion, like that of a parent to a child. Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self explores the importance of caritas to early modern communities, introducing the concept of the 'emotional ethic' to explain how neighbourly love become not only a code for moral living but a part of felt experience. As an emotional ethic, caritas was an embodied norm, where physical feeling and bodily practices guided right action, and was practiced in the choices and actions of everyday life. Using a case study of the Scottish lower orders, this book highlights how caritas shaped relationships between men and women, families, and the broader community. Focusing on marriage, childhood and youth, 'sinful sex', privacy and secrecy, and hospitality towards the itinerant poor, Caritas provides a rich analysis of the emotional lives of the poor and the embodied moral framework that guided their behaviour. Charting the period 1660 to 1830, it highlights how caritas evolved in response to the growing significance of romantic love, as well as new ideas of social relation between men, such as fraternity and benevolence.

Mothers of the Nation

Mothers of the Nation PDF Author: Anne K. Mellor
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253028191
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
A survey of British women’s writings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the revolutionary New Woman they promoted. British women writers were enormously influential in the creation of public opinion and political ideology during the years from 1780 to 1830. Anne Mellor demonstrates the many ways in which they attempted to shape British public policy and cultural behavior in the areas of religious and governmental reform, education, philanthropy, and patterns of consumption. She argues that the theoretical paradigm of the “doctrine of the separate spheres” may no longer be valid. According to this view, British society was divided into distinctly differentiated and gendered spheres of public versus private activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Surveying all the genres of literature?drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, and literary criticism?Mellor shows how women writers promoted a new concept of the ideal woman as rationally educated, sexually self-disciplined, and above all, virtuous. This New Woman, these writers said, was better suited to govern the nation than were its current fiscally irresponsible, lecherous, and corruptible male rulers. Beginning with Hannah More, Mellor argues that women writers too often dismissed as conservative or retrogressive instead promoted a revolution in cultural mores or manners. She discusses writers as diverse as Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and Joanna Baillie; as Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, and Lucy Aikin; as Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Reeve, and Anna Seward; and concludes with extended analyses of Charlotte Smith’s Desmond and Jane Austen’s Persuasion. She thus documents women writers’ full participation in that very discursive public sphere which Habermas so famously restricted to men of property. Moreover, the new career of philanthropy defined by Hannah More provided a practical means by which women of all classes could actively construct a new British civil society, and thus become the mothers not only of individual households but of the nation as a whole. “Intellectual and social historians (and not just feminists) have long believed that the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain saw an increasing separation of the male (public) and female (domestic) realms, with the result that the public sphere theorized by Jurgen Habermas and others to have emerged in the Enlightenment almost entirely excluded women. With energy, wit, and admirable command of her sources, Mellor . . . author of distinguished books on Romanticism . . . demonstrates that just the opposite was true: in the years around 1800, women became the primary producers and consumers of writing in Britain and vitally participated in the discursive public sphere—many arguing in their different ways for what Hannah More (the most popular author of the period) called a moral revolution in the national manners and principles. . . . [A] splendid survey of women novelists, poets, critics, playwrights, and social theorists . . . this bracing and important work of revision deserves a place in serious academic libraries serving both undergraduates and advanced scholars.” —D. L. Patey, Choice

Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain

Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain PDF Author: Mark Knights
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019151456X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
In this original and illuminating new study, Mark Knights reveals how the political culture of the eighteenth century grew out of earlier trends and innovations. Arguing that the period from 1675 needs to be seen as the second stage of a seventeenth-century revolution that ran on until c.1720, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain charts the growth of a national political culture and traces the development of the public as an arbiter of politics. In doing so, it uncovers a crisis of public discourse and credibility, and finds a political enlightenment rooted in local and national partisan conflict. The later Stuart period was characterized by frequent elections, the lapse of pre-publication licensing, the emergence of party politics, the creation of a public debt, and ideological conflict over popular sovereignty. These factors combined to enhance the status of the 'public', not least in requiring it to make numerous acts of judgement. Contemporaries from across the political spectrum feared that the public might be misled by the misrepresentations pedalled by their rivals. Each side, and those ostensibly of no side, discerned a culture of passion, slander, libel, lies, hypocrisy, dissimulation, conspiracy, private languages, and fictions. 'Truth' appeared an ambiguous, political matter. Yet the reaction to partisanship was also creative, for it helped to construct an ideal form of political discourse. This was one based on reason rather than passion, on moderation rather than partisan zeal, on critical reading rather than credulity; and an increasing realization that these virtues arose from infrequent rather than frequent elections. Finding synergies between social, political, religious, scientific, literary, cultural, and intellectual history, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain reinvigorates the debate about the emergence of 'the public sphere' in the later Stuart period.

Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century

Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Katharine Gillespie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139451960
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In Domesticity and Dissent Katharine Gillespie examines writings by seventeenth-century English Puritan women who fought for religious freedom. Seeking the right to preach and prophesy, women such as Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, and Anne Wentworth envisioned the modern political principles of toleration, the separation of Church from state, privacy, and individualism. Gillespie argues that their sermons, prophesies, and petitions illustrate the fact that these liberal theories did not originate only with such well-known male thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rather, they emerged also from a group of determined female religious dissenters who used the Bible to reassess traditional definitions of womanhood, public speech and religious and political authority. Gillespie takes the 'pamphlet literatures' of the seventeenth century as important subjects for analysis, and her study contributes to the important scholarship on the revolutionary writings that emerged during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War in England.

Everyday Revolutions

Everyday Revolutions PDF Author: Diane E. Boyd
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874130072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Women's everyday choices can engender revolutionary acts. This collection gathers essays that build upon this premise and examines the ways in which eighteenth-century women defied not only the restrictions their own culture sought to enforce, but also the restrictions our historical and literary understandings have created.

Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England PDF Author: James Daybell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192566687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book represents the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period so far undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. The book also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.

Gender and the English Revolution

Gender and the English Revolution PDF Author: Ann Hughes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136642498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
From the most important feminist scholar of early modern Britain in the UK, this is a fascinating and unique examination of how the experience of the civil wars in England changed both role and conception of women and men in politics, society and culture.

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: E. Clery
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230509045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
In the Eighteenth-century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury , and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.