Writing and European Thought 1600-1830

Writing and European Thought 1600-1830 PDF Author: Nicholas Hudson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521455404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book argues for the importance of writing to conceptions of language, technology, and civilization in the early modern era.

Writing and European Thought 1600-1830

Writing and European Thought 1600-1830 PDF Author: Nicholas Hudson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521455404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book argues for the importance of writing to conceptions of language, technology, and civilization in the early modern era.

Language and Enlightenment

Language and Enlightenment PDF Author: Avi Lifschitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilization without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts, and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language and Enlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

Samuel Johnson in Context

Samuel Johnson in Context PDF Author: John T. Lynch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052119010X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
A work of reference on 'the age of Johnson', putting literature in the context of the society that produced it.

Novel Minds

Novel Minds PDF Author: R. Tierney-Hynes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137033290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.

Theatre Histories

Theatre Histories PDF Author: Phillip B. Zarrilli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134042949
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
This new edition of the innovative and widely acclaimed Theatre Histories: An Introduction offers overviews of theatre and drama in many world cultures and periods together with case studies demonstrating the methods and interpretive approaches used by today's theatre historians. Completely revised and renewed in color, enhancements and new material include: a full-color text design with added timelines to each opening section a wealth of new color illustrations to help convey the vitality of performances described new case studies on African, Asian, and Western subjects a new chapter on modernism, and updated and expanded chapters and part introductions fuller definitions of terms and concepts throughout in a new glossary a re-designed support website offering links to new audio-visual resources, expanded bibliographies, approaches to teaching theatre and performance history, discussion questions relating to case studies and an online glossary.

The Complexion of Race

The Complexion of Race PDF Author: Roxann Wheeler
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition's success as being "Black as Coal." Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons—but neither was the statement that followed: "here, thro' Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men." The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period. Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment's scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be "redeemed" by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler's eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain PDF Author: Levy Michelle Levy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474457088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
A study of the production and circulation of literary manuscripts in Romantic-era BritainOffers a detailed examination of the practices of literary manuscript culture, particularly the production, circulation and preservation of manuscripts, based on extensive archival researchDemonstrates how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, in a nuanced study of the interactions between the two mediaExamines the changing cultural attitudes towards literary manuscripts, and how these changes affected practices and valuesSurveys the impact of digital media on our access to and understanding of historical manuscriptsThis book examines how manuscript practices interacted with an expanding print marketplace to nurture and transform the period's literary culture. It unearths the alternative histories manuscripts tell us about British Romantic literary culture, describing the practices by which handwritten documents were written, shared, altered and preserved, and explores the functions they served as instruments of expression and sociability. By demonstrating how literary manuscript culture co-evolved with print culture, this study illuminates the complex entanglements between the media of script and print.

Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-first Century

Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-first Century PDF Author: Min Wild
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611485207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Front Flap: Poet, essayist, actor, hymn-writer, wit, magazine editor, transvestite stage performer: Christopher Smart, Georgian don-turned-writer, was all of these. He was, and remains, a mercurial individual, an idiosyncratic yet strangely familiar writer of spiritual heights and material depths. His paradoxical exuberance fascinates scholars of eighteenth-century culture, and this collection of essays, a snapshot of current scholarship from both new and established Smart scholars, offers, among others, literary, theological, dramatic and philosophical perspectives on his writing. Here are new ways of reading familiar Smart works — including the astonishing, devout poem of his incarceration, Jubilate Agno — and unfamiliar ones, such as his translations and writing for children. Unexpected readers of Smart, from Coleridge to a testy anonymous annotator, are examined, and Smart's sacred translations and profane stage presence each find a place. Tom Keymer's re-evaluating afterword finds the quality of “betweenness” in Smart's work: between eras, between genres, between forms, Smart's vitality demands reassessment for each new generation of readers. Contributors: Karina Williamson, Min Wild, Rosalind Powell, Fraser Easton, Clement Hawes, William E. Levine, Noel Chevalier, Lori A. Branch, Daniel J. Ennis, Chris Mounsey, Debbie Welham, Tom Keymer. Back Flap: The editors Min Wild's monograph Christopher Smartand Satire on Smart's Midwife, was published in 2008, and various articles and reviews of a Smartian bent have followed. Her interest in that eighteenth-century favorite, the literary mode of prosopopoeia, has led her to investigate the personification of words, texts and literary modes themselves. She lectures in eighteenth-century literature and theory at Plymouth University, UK, and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Noel Chevalier is Associate Professor of English at Luther College, University of Regina, Canada. He has published articles on Jubilate Agno and on Smart’s challenge to “legitimate” playhouses in Mrs. Midnight’sOratory. Although his specialty lies in the eighteenth century, his teaching and research cover a diverse range of topics, from literary responses to the Bible, to the roots of globalization, to literary representations of science and scientists. He has helped create two interdisciplinary programs at Luther: one which addresses literature for students in the sciences, and one which explores the philosophical, political, economic, and cultural contexts of globalization. Jacket illustration: "Amaryllis sarniensis or Guernsey Amaryllis," from William Curtis, The Botanical Magazine; or, Flower-GardenDisplayed, Vol. IX. No. 294. London, 1795.

The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past

The Renaissance Epic and the Oral Past PDF Author: Anthony Welch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300188994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This book offers a close survey of the changing audiences, modes of reading, and cultural expectations that shaped epic writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to Anthony Welch, the theory and practice of epic poetry in this period—including little-known attempts by many epic poets to have their work orally recited or set to music—must be understood in the context of Renaissance musical humanism. Welch’s approach leads to a fresh perspective on a literary culture that stood on the brink of a new relationship with antiquity and on the history of music in the early modern era.

Carnal Reading

Carnal Reading PDF Author: Joseph Pappa
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611490057
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
The question of an erotic readership has always vexed scholars. With little evidence of anyone's actually reading erotic material, scholars have made due with variations of an "ideal reader" approach. Insofar as it presupposes authorial intention and a stable meaning this theoretical model proves unsatisfactory. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Carnal Reading proposes a new theory of erotic reading that refigures bodily responses as constitutive of cognitive understanding. Chapters explore the enthusiasm inspired by religious reading, the impressionable and "permeable" nature of the early modern body, contemporary literary critiques and the potential eroticism immanent in language.