Macaulay and the Enlightenment

Macaulay and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Nathaniel Wolloch
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277254
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world.

Macaulay and the Enlightenment

Macaulay and the Enlightenment PDF Author: Nathaniel Wolloch
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783277254
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world.

The Saga of Edmund Burke

The Saga of Edmund Burke PDF Author: Mark Hulliung
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000920321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
This book offers an examination of responses to Edmund Burke from the last decades of the eighteenth century to the present day, ending with the question whether there is still a role for him to play in post-Thatcher England. It includes a chapter asking the same question about America. The sharp focus on Burke’s legacy permits the author to cover a great many years while remaining quite concise. Written in an accessible style, modest in length, covering major debates in England over the course of two centuries and more, this book aims to reach out to as many potential readers as possible.

Lord Macaulay's History of England

Lord Macaulay's History of England PDF Author: John Burrow
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441159118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II was his masterwork and one of the great enduring classics of English historical writing. This volume contains the celebrated third chapter, which inherently contributed to the development of social history by presenting a highly contextually relevant extensive survey of English society in the year 1685, in terms of such things as population, cities, classes, and tastes. Macaulay's approach to his subject, as John Burrow explains in his masterly introduction, was that of a definite advocate of "progress." He saw many real achievements in British and World history as resulting from policies pursued by Whig political interest.

The Victorian Eighteenth Century

The Victorian Eighteenth Century PDF Author: B. W. Young
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191531316
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The Victorians were preoccupied by the eighteenth century. It was central to many nineteenth-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M.R. James to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the twentieth century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the eighteenth century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularising influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of eighteenth-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the eighteenth century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the nineteenth-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the eighteenth century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant eighteenth-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M.R. James.

Moderate and Radical Liberalism

Moderate and Radical Liberalism PDF Author: Nathaniel Wolloch
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900450804X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 982

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Book Description
A new reading of a crucial chapter in the history of social and political thought – the transition from the late Enlightenment to early liberalism.

The English Cult of Literature

The English Cult of Literature PDF Author: William R. McKelvy
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
What constitutes reading? This is the question William McKelvy asks in The English Cult of Literature. Is it a theory of interpretation or a physical activity, a process determined by hermeneutic destiny or by paper, ink, hands, and eyes? McKelvy seeks to transform the nineteenth-century field of "Religion and Literature" into "Reading and Religion," emphasizing both the material and the institutional contexts for each. In doing so, he hopes to recover the ways in which modern literary authority developed in dialogue with a politically reconfigured religious authority.The received wisdom has been that England's literary tradition was modernity's most promising religion because the established forms of Christianity, wounded in the Enlightenment, inevitably gave up their hold on the imagination and on the political sphere. Through a series of case studies and analysis of a diverse range of writing, this work gives life to a very different story, one that shows literature assuming a religious vocation in concert with an increasingly unencumbered freedom of religious confession and the making of a reading nation. In the process the author shifts attention away from the idea of the literary critic in favor of considering the historic role of religious professionals in shaping and contesting the authority of print.Indebted to recent findings of book history and newer historiographies at odds with conventional secularization theory, this work makes an interdisciplinary contribution to revising the existing models for understanding change in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914

Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914 PDF Author: Emily Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192520091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Between 1830 and 1914 in Britain a dramatic modification of the reputation of Edmund Burke (1730-1797) occurred. Burke, an Irishman and Whig politician, is now most commonly known as the 'founder of modern conservatism' - an intellectual tradition which is also deeply connected to the identity of the British Conservative Party. The idea of 'Burkean conservatism' - a political philosophy which upholds 'the authority of tradition', the organic, historic conception of society, and the necessity of order, religion, and property - has been incredibly influential both in international academic analysis and in the wider political world. This is a highly significant intellectual construct, but its origins have not yet been understood. Emily Jones demonstrates, for the first time, that the transformation of Burke into the 'founder of conservatism' was in fact part of wider developments in British political, intellectual, and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including political texts, parliamentary speeches, histories, biographies, and educational curricula, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism shows how and why Burke's reputation was transformed over a formative period of British history. In doing so, it bridges the significant gap between the history of political thought as conventionally understood and the history of the making of political traditions. The result is to demonstrate that, by 1914, Burke had been firmly established as a 'conservative' political philosopher and was admired and utilized by political Conservatives in Britain who identified themselves as his intellectual heirs. This was one essential component of a conscious re-working of C/conservatism which is still at work today.

A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?

A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? PDF Author: Boyd Hilton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191606820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 784

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Book Description
This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of 'war to the death' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'.

Modern Age

Modern Age PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : International relations
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description


Civilization

Civilization PDF Author: E.A. Heaman
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228012880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Colonial Canada changed enormously between the 1760s and the 1860s, the Conquest and Confederation, but the idea of civilization seen to guide those transformations changed still more. A cosmopolitan and optimistic theory of history was written into the founding Canadian constitution as a check on state violence, only to be reversed and undone over the next century. Civilization was hegemony, a contradictory theory of unrestrained power and restraints on that power. Occupying a middle ground between British and American hegemonies, all the different peoples living in Canada felt those contradictions very sharply. Both Britain and America came to despair of bending Canada violently to their will, and new forms of hegemony, a greater reckoning with soft power, emerged in the wake of those failures. E.A. Heaman shows that the view from colonial Canada matters for intellectual and political history. Canada posed serious challenges to the Scottish Enlightenment, the Pax Britannica, American manifest destiny, and the emerging model of the nation-state. David Hume’s theory of history shaped the Canadian imaginary in constitutional documents, much-thumbed histories, and a certain liberal-conservative political and financial orientation. But as settlers flooded across the continent, cosmopolitanism became chauvinism, and the idea of civilization was put to accomplishing plunder and predation on a transcontinental scale. Case studies show crucial moments of conceptual reversal, some broadly representative and some unique to Canada. Dissecting the Seven Years’ War, domestic relations, the fiscal military state, liberal reform, social statistics, democracy, constitutionalism, and scholarly history, Heaman shows how key British and Canadian public figures grappled with the growing gap between theory and practice. By historicizing the concept of civilization, this book connects Enlightenment ideals and anti-colonialism, shown in contest with colonialism in Canada before Confederation.