Author: Maximillian E. Novak
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
This volume attempts to explore some of the many aspects of sensibility throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century. The essays examine the fine distinctions between definitions of sensibility as well as a wide range of possibilities and implications involving political theory, imperial ambitions, homosocial codes of language, and the ways in which sensibility manifested itself in the literature of the period.
Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility
Author: Maximillian E. Novak
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
This volume attempts to explore some of the many aspects of sensibility throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century. The essays examine the fine distinctions between definitions of sensibility as well as a wide range of possibilities and implications involving political theory, imperial ambitions, homosocial codes of language, and the ways in which sensibility manifested itself in the literature of the period.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
This volume attempts to explore some of the many aspects of sensibility throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century. The essays examine the fine distinctions between definitions of sensibility as well as a wide range of possibilities and implications involving political theory, imperial ambitions, homosocial codes of language, and the ways in which sensibility manifested itself in the literature of the period.
Making Love
Author: Paul Kelleher
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611486947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
In Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Paul Kelleher revises the history of sexuality from the vantage point of the literary history of sentimentalism. Kelleher demonstrates how eighteenth-century British philosophers, essayists, and novelists fundamentally reconceived the relations among sentiment, sexuality, and moral virtue. It is his contention that sentimental discourse, both philosophical and literary, posited heterosexual desire as the precondition of moral feeling and conduct. The author further suggests that sentimental writers fashioned the ideal of conjugal love as an ideological antidote to the theories of self-love and self-interest found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Heterosexual desire and its culmination in conjugal love, in other words, were represented as the privileged means for an individual to transcend self-love and to develop a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At the same time, Kelleher suggests, other pleasures and desires—particularly those rooted in same-sex eroticism—were increasingly depicted as antithetical to conjugal love and, thus, were morally devalued and socially disenfranchised. Kelleher's argument unfolds through close readings of a variety of texts, including Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s the Tatler and the Spectator, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Although these texts embody diverse rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns, he shows how they collectively reinforce an overarching sentimental ideology: on the one hand, heterosexual desire and conjugal love become synonymous with sympathy, benevolence, and moral goodness, while on the other hand, same-sex desire is pathologized as a selfish withdrawal from procreation, domesticity, sociability, and ultimately, “humanity” itself.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611486947
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
Book Description
In Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Paul Kelleher revises the history of sexuality from the vantage point of the literary history of sentimentalism. Kelleher demonstrates how eighteenth-century British philosophers, essayists, and novelists fundamentally reconceived the relations among sentiment, sexuality, and moral virtue. It is his contention that sentimental discourse, both philosophical and literary, posited heterosexual desire as the precondition of moral feeling and conduct. The author further suggests that sentimental writers fashioned the ideal of conjugal love as an ideological antidote to the theories of self-love and self-interest found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Heterosexual desire and its culmination in conjugal love, in other words, were represented as the privileged means for an individual to transcend self-love and to develop a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At the same time, Kelleher suggests, other pleasures and desires—particularly those rooted in same-sex eroticism—were increasingly depicted as antithetical to conjugal love and, thus, were morally devalued and socially disenfranchised. Kelleher's argument unfolds through close readings of a variety of texts, including Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s the Tatler and the Spectator, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Although these texts embody diverse rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns, he shows how they collectively reinforce an overarching sentimental ideology: on the one hand, heterosexual desire and conjugal love become synonymous with sympathy, benevolence, and moral goodness, while on the other hand, same-sex desire is pathologized as a selfish withdrawal from procreation, domesticity, sociability, and ultimately, “humanity” itself.
Sexed Sentiments
Author: Willemijn Ruberg
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042032421
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Sexed Sentiments provides a gender perspective on the recent turn to affect in criticism. It presents new work by scholars from different disciplines working on gender and emotion, a field par excellence where an interdisciplinary focus is fruitful. This collection presents essays from disciplines like history, literary studies, psychology, sociology and queer studies, focusing on subjects varying from masculinity in the cult of sensibility to the role of empathy in forging feminist solidarities. The volume illuminates how new theoretical approaches to both gender and emotion may be productively applied to a variety of fields.
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042032421
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Sexed Sentiments provides a gender perspective on the recent turn to affect in criticism. It presents new work by scholars from different disciplines working on gender and emotion, a field par excellence where an interdisciplinary focus is fruitful. This collection presents essays from disciplines like history, literary studies, psychology, sociology and queer studies, focusing on subjects varying from masculinity in the cult of sensibility to the role of empathy in forging feminist solidarities. The volume illuminates how new theoretical approaches to both gender and emotion may be productively applied to a variety of fields.
The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry
Author: Koen Vermeir
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400721021
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke’s oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400721021
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke’s oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.
The English Renaissance and the Far East
Author: Adele Lee
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611475163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present. Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia. Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611475163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters is an original and timely examination of cultural encounters between Britain, China, and Japan. It challenges accepted, Anglocentric models of East-West relations and offers a radical reconceptualization of the English Renaissance, suggesting it was not so different from current developments in an increasingly Sinocentric world, and that as China, in particular, returns to a global center-stage that it last occupied pre-1800, a curious and overlooked synergy exists between the early modern and the present. Prompted by the current eastward tilt in global power, in particular towards China, Adele Lee examines cultural interactions between Britain and the Far East in both the early modern and postmodern periods. She explores how key encounters with and representations of the Far East are described in early modern writing, and demonstrates how work of that period, particularly Shakespeare, has a special power today to facilitate encounters between Britain and East Asia. Readers will find the past illuminating the present and vice versa in a book that has at its heart resonances between Renaissance and present-day cultural exchanges, and which takes a cyclical, “long-view” of history to offer a new, innovative approach to a subject of contemporary importance.
Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Author: Jolene Zigarovich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136182365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136182365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.
The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature
Author: Mingjun Lu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317038509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England’s participation in ’the race for the Far East’ launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of ’liberal cosmopolitanism’ to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu’s work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317038509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature examines how English writers responded to the cultural shock caused by the first substantial encounter between China and Western Europe. Author Mingjun Lu explores how Donne and Milton came to be aware of England’s participation in ’the race for the Far East’ launched by Spain and Portugal, and how this new global awareness shaped their conceptions of cultural pluralism. Drawing on globalization theory, a framework that proves useful to help us rethink the literary world of Renaissance England in terms of global maritime networks, Lu proposes the concept of ’liberal cosmopolitanism’ to study early modern English engagement with the other. The advanced culture of the Chinese, Lu argues, inculcated in Donne and Milton a respect for difference and a cosmopolitan curiosity that ultimately led both authors to reflect in profound and previously unexamined ways upon their Eurocentric and monotheistic assumptions. The liberal cosmopolitan model not only opens Renaissance literary texts to globalization theory but also initiates a new way of thinking about the early modern encounter with the other beyond the conventional colonial/postcolonial, nationalist, and Orientalist frameworks. By pushing East-West contact back to the period in 1570s-1670s, Lu’s work uncovers some hitherto unrecognized Chinese elements in Western culture and their shaping influence upon English literary imagination.
Male-Male Intimacy in Early America
Author: William E Benemann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317953452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Previously hard-to-find information on homosexuality in early America—now in a convenient single volume! Few of us are familiar with the gay men on General Washington’s staff or among the leaders of the new republic. Now, in the same way that Alex Haley’s Roots provided a generation of African Americans with an appreciation of their history, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships will give many gay readers their first glimpse of homosexuality as a theme in early American history. Honored as a 2007 Stonewall Book Award nonfiction selection, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the role of homosexual activity among American men in the early years of American history. This single source brings together information that has until now been widely scattered in journals and distant archives. The book draws on personal letters, diaries, court records, and contemporary publications to examine the role of homosexual activity in the lives of American men in the Colonial period and in the early years of the new republic. The author scoured research that was published in contemporary journals and also conducted his own research in over a dozen US archives, ranging from the Library of Congress to the Huntington Library, from the United Military Academy Archives to the Missouri Historical Society. Male-Male Intimacy in Early America explores: the role of the open frontier and the unregulated seas as places of refuge for men who would not enter into heterosexual relationships the sexual lives of American Indians—particularly the berdache tradition—and how the stereotypes associated with American Indian sexuality molded white America’s attitudes toward homosexuality homosexuality in slave narratives—and the homosexual subtexts of racist minstrel show lyrics the formation of European gay communities during American colonial times, with an emphasis on Berlin, Paris, and London—with English translations of material previously available only in German or French! homosexuality as presented in eighteenth-century novels popular with American readers, plus information on homosexuality that was published in medical treatises of the period United States Army and Navy courts-martial that focused on sodomy the sublimation of homosexuality by religious revival movements of the early nineteenth century, particularly among Quakers, Mormons, and Oneida Perfectionists social groups as a perceived cover for homosexual activity, with an emphasis on the Masonic Order non-procreative sexuality as a theme and as a threat during the American revolution the West in American literary tradition—and the role of popular writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Davy Crockett in creating the myth of individual sexual freedom on the margins of American society Author William Benemann rejects Foucault’s contention that homosexuality is an artificial construct created by medico-legal authorities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He recognizes that men have been sexually attracted to other men throughout American history, and in this book, examines their historical options for expressing that attraction. He also addresses related issues surrounding race and gender expectations, population and migration patterns, vocational choice, and information exchange. Written in a straightforward style that can easily be understood by lay readers, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is an ideal choice for educators, students, and individuals interested in this unexplored area of American history and sexuality studies.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317953452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Previously hard-to-find information on homosexuality in early America—now in a convenient single volume! Few of us are familiar with the gay men on General Washington’s staff or among the leaders of the new republic. Now, in the same way that Alex Haley’s Roots provided a generation of African Americans with an appreciation of their history, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships will give many gay readers their first glimpse of homosexuality as a theme in early American history. Honored as a 2007 Stonewall Book Award nonfiction selection, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the role of homosexual activity among American men in the early years of American history. This single source brings together information that has until now been widely scattered in journals and distant archives. The book draws on personal letters, diaries, court records, and contemporary publications to examine the role of homosexual activity in the lives of American men in the Colonial period and in the early years of the new republic. The author scoured research that was published in contemporary journals and also conducted his own research in over a dozen US archives, ranging from the Library of Congress to the Huntington Library, from the United Military Academy Archives to the Missouri Historical Society. Male-Male Intimacy in Early America explores: the role of the open frontier and the unregulated seas as places of refuge for men who would not enter into heterosexual relationships the sexual lives of American Indians—particularly the berdache tradition—and how the stereotypes associated with American Indian sexuality molded white America’s attitudes toward homosexuality homosexuality in slave narratives—and the homosexual subtexts of racist minstrel show lyrics the formation of European gay communities during American colonial times, with an emphasis on Berlin, Paris, and London—with English translations of material previously available only in German or French! homosexuality as presented in eighteenth-century novels popular with American readers, plus information on homosexuality that was published in medical treatises of the period United States Army and Navy courts-martial that focused on sodomy the sublimation of homosexuality by religious revival movements of the early nineteenth century, particularly among Quakers, Mormons, and Oneida Perfectionists social groups as a perceived cover for homosexual activity, with an emphasis on the Masonic Order non-procreative sexuality as a theme and as a threat during the American revolution the West in American literary tradition—and the role of popular writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Davy Crockett in creating the myth of individual sexual freedom on the margins of American society Author William Benemann rejects Foucault’s contention that homosexuality is an artificial construct created by medico-legal authorities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He recognizes that men have been sexually attracted to other men throughout American history, and in this book, examines their historical options for expressing that attraction. He also addresses related issues surrounding race and gender expectations, population and migration patterns, vocational choice, and information exchange. Written in a straightforward style that can easily be understood by lay readers, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America is an ideal choice for educators, students, and individuals interested in this unexplored area of American history and sexuality studies.
England's First Family of Writers
Author: Julie A. Carlson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801891833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 515
Book Description
A collective consideration of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley with “extended and sophisticated readings of many of [their] neglected works” (Choice). Life and literature were inseparable for Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley. In England’s First Family of Writers, Julie A. Carlson demonstrates how and why the works of these individuals can best be understood within the context of the family unit in which they were created. The first to consider their writing collectively, Carlson finds in the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley dynasty a family of writers whose works are in intimate dialogue with each other. For them, literature made love and produced children, as well as mourned, memorialized, and reanimated the dead. Construing the ways in which this family’s works minimize the differences between books and persons, writing and living, Carlson offers a nonsentimental account of the extent to which books can live and inform life and death. Carlson also examines the unorthodox clan’s status as England’s first family of writers. She explores how, over time, their reception has evinced ongoing public resistance to those who critique family values.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801891833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 515
Book Description
A collective consideration of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley with “extended and sophisticated readings of many of [their] neglected works” (Choice). Life and literature were inseparable for Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley. In England’s First Family of Writers, Julie A. Carlson demonstrates how and why the works of these individuals can best be understood within the context of the family unit in which they were created. The first to consider their writing collectively, Carlson finds in the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley dynasty a family of writers whose works are in intimate dialogue with each other. For them, literature made love and produced children, as well as mourned, memorialized, and reanimated the dead. Construing the ways in which this family’s works minimize the differences between books and persons, writing and living, Carlson offers a nonsentimental account of the extent to which books can live and inform life and death. Carlson also examines the unorthodox clan’s status as England’s first family of writers. She explores how, over time, their reception has evinced ongoing public resistance to those who critique family values.
The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830
Author: Thomas Keymer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 542
Book Description
This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld and Austen, and to the role of literary schools such as the Lake and Cockney schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 542
Book Description
This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld and Austen, and to the role of literary schools such as the Lake and Cockney schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it essential reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism.