Refiguring the Coquette

Refiguring the Coquette PDF Author: Shelley King
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838757109
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This is a collection of nine original essays selected and edited with a twofold aim: to establish the parameters of coquetry as it was defined and represented in the long eighteenth century, and to reconsider this traditional figure in light of recent work in cultural and gender studies. The essays provide analyses of lesser-known works, examine the depiction of the coquette in popular culture, explore the importance of coquetry as a contemporary term applicable to men as well as women, and amplify current theorization of the coquette. By bringing together the diverse contexts and genres in which the figure of the coquette is articulated--drama, art, fiction, life-writing--Refiguring the Coquette offers alternative perspectives on this central figure in eighteenth-century culture. Shelley King is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen's University. Yael Schlick is Associate Adjunct Professor at Queen's University.

Refiguring the Coquette

Refiguring the Coquette PDF Author: Shelley King
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838757109
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a collection of nine original essays selected and edited with a twofold aim: to establish the parameters of coquetry as it was defined and represented in the long eighteenth century, and to reconsider this traditional figure in light of recent work in cultural and gender studies. The essays provide analyses of lesser-known works, examine the depiction of the coquette in popular culture, explore the importance of coquetry as a contemporary term applicable to men as well as women, and amplify current theorization of the coquette. By bringing together the diverse contexts and genres in which the figure of the coquette is articulated--drama, art, fiction, life-writing--Refiguring the Coquette offers alternative perspectives on this central figure in eighteenth-century culture. Shelley King is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen's University. Yael Schlick is Associate Adjunct Professor at Queen's University.

Our Coquettes

Our Coquettes PDF Author: Theresa Braunschneider
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813928141
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Before 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a "coquette"; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Why does British literature of this period pay so much attention to vain and flirtatious young women? Our Coquettes examines the ubiquity of the coquette in the eighteenth century to show how this figure enables authors to comment upon a series of significant social and economic developments—including the growth of consumer culture, widespread new wealth, increased travel and global trade, and changes in the perception and practice of marriage. The book surveys stage comedies, periodical essays, satirical poems, popular songs, and didactic novels to show that the early coquette is a figure of capacious desire: she finds pleasure in a wide range of choices, refusing to narrow any field of possibilities (admirers, luxury goods, friends, pets, public gatherings) down to a single option. Whereas scholars of the period have generally read the coquette as a simple and self-evident type, Our Coquettes emphasizes what is strange and surprising about this figure, revealing the coquette to be a touchstone in developing discourses about sexuality, consumerism, empire, and modernity itself. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell PDF Author: Sandro Jung
Publisher: Academia Press
ISBN: 9038216297
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Assembles fourteen original essays on Gaskell, the Victorian novelist of social problem fiction

Coquettes, Wives, and Widows

Coquettes, Wives, and Widows PDF Author: Marcie Ray
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
ISBN: 1580469884
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.

Distraction

Distraction PDF Author: Natalie M. Phillips
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421420139
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Enlightenment writers fiercely debated the nature of distraction in literature. Early novel reading typically conjures images of rapt readers in quiet rooms, but commentators at the time described reading as a fraught activity, one occurring amidst a distracting cacophony that included sloshing chamber pots and wailing street vendors. Auditory distractions were compounded by literary ones as falling paper costs led to an explosion of print material, forcing prose fiction to compete with a dizzying array of essays, poems, sermons, and histories. In Distraction, Natalie M. Phillips argues that prominent Enlightenment authors—from Jane Austen and William Godwin to Eliza Haywood and Samuel Johnson—were deeply engaged with debates about the wandering mind, even if they were not equally concerned about the problem of distractibility. Phillips explains that some novelists in the 1700s—viewing distraction as a dangerous wandering from singular attention that could lead to sin or even madness—attempted to reform diverted readers. Johnson and Haywood, for example, worried that contemporary readers would only focus long enough to “look into the first pages” of essays and novels; Austen offered wry commentary on the issue through the creation of the daft Lydia Bennet, a character with an attention span so short she could listen only “half-a-minute.” Other authors radically redefined distraction as an excellent quality of mind, aligning the multiplicity of divided focus with the spontaneous creation of new thought. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, won audiences with its comically distracted narrator and uniquely digressive form. Using cognitive science as a framework to explore the intertwined history of mental states, philosophy, science, and literary forms, Phillips explains how arguments about the diverted mind made their way into the century’s most celebrated literature. She also draws a direct link between the disparate theories of focus articulated in eighteenth-century literature and modern experiments in neuroscience, revealing that contemporary questions surrounding short attention spans are grounded in long conversations over the nature and limits of focus.

Intimations of Modernity

Intimations of Modernity PDF Author: Louis A. Pérez Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Louis A. Perez Jr.'s new history of nineteenth-century Cuba chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence. Contributing to the cultural history of capitalism in Latin America, Perez argues that such creoles were cosmopolitans with powerful transnational affinities and an abiding identification with modernity. This period of Cuban history is usually viewed through a political lens, but Perez, here emphasizing the character of everyday life within the increasingly fraught colonial system, shows how moral, social, and cultural change that resulted from market forces also contributed to conditions leading to the collapse of the Spanish colonial administration. Perez highlights women's centrality in this process, showing how criollas adapted to new modes of self-representation as a means of self-fulfillment. Increasing opportunities for middle-class women's public presence and social participation was both cause and consequence of expanding consumerism and of women's challenges to prevailing gender hierarchies. Seemingly simple actions--riding a bicycle, for example, or deploying the abanico, the fan, in different ways--exposed how traditional systems of power and privilege clashed with norms of modernity and progress.

Metafiction

Metafiction PDF Author: Yaël Schlick
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100068525X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Metafiction explores the great variety and effects of this popular genre and style, variously defined as a type of literature that philosophically questions itself, that repudiates the conventions of literary realism, that questions the relationship between fiction and reality, or that lies at the border between fiction and non-fiction. Yaël Schlick surveys a wide range of metafictional writings by diverse authors, with particular focus on the contemporary period. This book asks not only what metafiction is but also what it can do, examining metafictional narratives' usefulness for exploring the role of art in society, its role in conceptualizing the figure of author and the reader of fiction, its investigation and playfulness with respect to language and linguistic conventions, and its troubling of the boundaries between fact and fiction in historiographic metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory. Metafiction is an engaging and accessible introduction to a pervasive and influential form and concept in literary studies, and will be of use to all students of literary studies requiring a depth of knowledge in the subject.

Milton in the Long Restoration

Milton in the Long Restoration PDF Author: Blair Hoxby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191082406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.

Pagodas in Play

Pagodas in Play PDF Author: Adrienne Ward
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838756964
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Pagodas in Play analyzes the treatment of China in the imaginative and spectacular world of eighteenth-century Italian opera. It shows how Italians used perceptions of Chinese culture to address local and transnational developments, particularly Enlightenment and secular reform initiatives. Its focus on the texts and performance practices of opera, an entertainment form accessible to a wide public, reveals cultural operations and identities harder to detect in non-fictional reformist writings, the texts traditionally privileged to explain Italian mediations of Enlightenment ideas. In its close reading of nine libretti of the most salient Settecento operas treating China (opere serie and opere buffe by authors including Metastasio, Zeno, Goldoni and Lorenzi), Pagodas in Play differentiates Italian iterations of Chinese culture from French and English counterparts. It further challenges certain tenets of orientalism, showing how it operates when nationalist and/or colonialist projects are absent, and how orientalist practices in eighteenth-century Italy exhibit early on the complexity some scholars locate only in the twentieth century. Adrienne Ward teaches Italian literature and culture at the University of Virginia.

The Experimental Imagination

The Experimental Imagination PDF Author: Tita Chico
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503606457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.