Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742 PDF Author: Melissa Mowry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192658395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Political, literary, and cultural historians of the early modern Anglophone world have long characterized the crucial century between 1642 and 1742 as the period when absolutist theories of sovereignty yielded their dominance to shared models of governance and a burgeoning doctrine of unalienable, individual rights. Yet even the most cursory glance at the cultural record, reveals that individualism was largely a footnote to a conflict over the production of political and cultural authority that erupted around the middle of the seventeenth century between sovereignty and collectivity. Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History reaches back to the English civil wars (1642-46, 1648) when a distinctive and anti-authoritarian hermeneutic emerged from the dissident community known as the Levellers. Active between 1645 and 1653, the Levellers argued that a more just political order required that knowledge, previously structured by the epistemology of singularity upon which sovereignty had built its authority, be reorganized around the interpretive principles and practices of affiliation and collectivity. Collective Understanding contends that late Stuart and eighteenth-century literature played a central role in marginalizing the non-elite methods of interpretation and knowledge production that had emerged in the 1640s. While pamphlets and other readily available texts ridiculed members of the commonalty, it was the longer narrative arcs of drama and fiction that were uniquely able to foreground the collaborative methods civil war dissidents and the Levellers in particular had used to advance their opposition to sovereignty's epistemological paradigm. Writers such as William Davenant, Aphra Behn, Edward Sexby, Algernon Sidney, and Daniel Defoe repeatedly exposed these dissident methods as a profound and potentially catastrophic challenge to the political privileges of the ancien régime as well as its ancestral monopoly on the production of new knowledge.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742 PDF Author: Melissa Mowry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192658395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book

Book Description
Political, literary, and cultural historians of the early modern Anglophone world have long characterized the crucial century between 1642 and 1742 as the period when absolutist theories of sovereignty yielded their dominance to shared models of governance and a burgeoning doctrine of unalienable, individual rights. Yet even the most cursory glance at the cultural record, reveals that individualism was largely a footnote to a conflict over the production of political and cultural authority that erupted around the middle of the seventeenth century between sovereignty and collectivity. Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History reaches back to the English civil wars (1642-46, 1648) when a distinctive and anti-authoritarian hermeneutic emerged from the dissident community known as the Levellers. Active between 1645 and 1653, the Levellers argued that a more just political order required that knowledge, previously structured by the epistemology of singularity upon which sovereignty had built its authority, be reorganized around the interpretive principles and practices of affiliation and collectivity. Collective Understanding contends that late Stuart and eighteenth-century literature played a central role in marginalizing the non-elite methods of interpretation and knowledge production that had emerged in the 1640s. While pamphlets and other readily available texts ridiculed members of the commonalty, it was the longer narrative arcs of drama and fiction that were uniquely able to foreground the collaborative methods civil war dissidents and the Levellers in particular had used to advance their opposition to sovereignty's epistemological paradigm. Writers such as William Davenant, Aphra Behn, Edward Sexby, Algernon Sidney, and Daniel Defoe repeatedly exposed these dissident methods as a profound and potentially catastrophic challenge to the political privileges of the ancien régime as well as its ancestral monopoly on the production of new knowledge.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742 PDF Author: Melissa M. Mowry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191927119
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This title explores the ways in which the non-elite literary culture of the late seventeenth to mid eighteenth centuries worked to produce knowledge through collaborative means, in opposition to this period's more widely recognized focus on the authority of individuality.

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645-1742 PDF Author: Melissa Mowry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192844385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Explores the ways in which the non-elite literary culture of the late seventeenth to mid eighteenth centuries worked to produce knowledge through collaborative means, in opposition to this period's more widely recognized focus on the authority of individuality.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English PDF Author: Sarah Eron
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003845266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 905

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

The Patriot Opposition to Walpole

The Patriot Opposition to Walpole PDF Author: Christine Gerrard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
What did it mean to be a "Patriot" during the Walpole administration? This is the first full-length study of the so-called Patriot opposition to Walpole which reached its height during the clamor for war against Spain at the turn of the 1730s. Christine Gerrard examines the interrelationship between patriotism, politics, and poetry in the period 1724-1742, looking at the poetry and drama of such authors as James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and the young Samuel Johnson, who were all drawn to the heady idealism of the young Boy Patriots. Other authors discussed include Bolingbroke, Lyttleton, West, Mallet, and Hill, and Gerrard looks, too, at the literature, prints, architecture, and statuary of the 1730s.

The Victorian Eighteenth Century

The Victorian Eighteenth Century PDF Author: B.W. Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199256225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Exploring the Victorian fascination with the generation of their grandparents and great-grandparents, Brian Young illuminates Victorian intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Examining the work of men such as Thomas Carlyle, the book reveals how the Victorians were haunted by the eighteenth century, both metaphorically and literally.

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy PDF Author: Alex Eric Hernandez
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198846576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The 'rise of the middle class' in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an 'ordinary suffering' proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, this 'bourgeois and domestic tragedy' treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this volume sees instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. By attending closely to this long neglected subject, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy turns the critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy on its head. It reads the genre's emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation on whose life--and whose way of life--is grievable, as well as how mourning might be performed

The Female Thermometer

The Female Thermometer PDF Author: Terry Castle
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019508098X
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.

Force or Fraud

Force or Fraud PDF Author: Toni Bowers
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199592136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This book tell the story of how rape and seduction came to be distinguished according to measures of women's resistance and consent in low-brow "amatory" writing, by writers such as Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Richardson.

Circulating Enlightenment

Circulating Enlightenment PDF Author: Adam Budd
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191019666
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Historians of the intellectual and literary culture of the Enlightenment have recognised the importance of Andrew Millar (1705-68). His publisher's imprint adorned the title-pages of the most important works of the eighteenth century, in fiction, poetry, drama, medicine, and philosophy. This is the first extended study of Millar's commercial and social role in the commissioning, production, circulation, and consumption of Enlightenment literature in Britain. Providing a new intervention on the culture of Enlightenment this study shows how and why Millar provoked major controversies through his role as friend, patron, and publisher to great rivals in the republic of letters. An unprecedent analysis of publishing and authorship at the intersection of politics, business, visual arts, moral debate, and literary self-fashioning, this study of Andrew Millar also shows the degree to which Scottish identity shaped a professional career within London's rise as the cosmopolitan centre of learning and trade at the heart of the British empire. This volume presents hundreds of previously unpublished letters that passed between Millar and his literary network, and includes the 52 letters that passed between Millar and David Hume, the majority of which have been edited for the first time since 1931. This is a major contribution to the material and intellectual worlds that defined the culture of Enlightenment in Britain during the eighteenth century, casting new light in the history of publishing and authorship.