Writing the Americas in Enlightenment Spain

Writing the Americas in Enlightenment Spain PDF Author: Thomas C. Neal
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488311
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
How did literary discourse about empire contribute to discussions about the implications of modernity and progress in eighteenth-century Spain? Writing the Americas seeks to answer this question by examining how novels, plays and short stories imagined and contested core notions about enlightened knowledge. Expanding upon recent transatlantic and postcolonial approaches to Spain's Enlightenment that have focused mostly on historiographical and scientific texts, this book disputes the long-standing perception of the Spanish Enlightenment as an "imitative" movement best defined best by its similarities with French and British contexts. Instead, through readings of major and minor texts by authors such as José Cadalso, Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Pedro Montengón and José María Blanco White, Writing the Americas argues that literary texts advanced a unique exploration of the compatibility between supposed universal principles and local histories, one which often diverged noticeably from dominant trends and patterns in Enlightenment thought elsewhere. The authors studied often drew directly from Spain's own imperial experiences to submit prevailing ideas about culture, commerce, education and political organization to scrutiny. Writing the Americas provides a new critical lens through which to reexamine the aesthetic and political content of eighteenth-century Spanish cultural production. While in the past, much of the debate about whether Spanish neoclassicism was "modern" literature has centered on formalistic qualities or romantic notions of "originality" or "subjectivity," ultimately, Writing the Americas locates the modernity of these literary works within the very ideological tensions they display towards the prevailing intellectual trends of the time. The interdisciplinary content and approach of Writing the Americas make it a valuable resource for a broad range of scholars including specialists in eighteenth-century and modern Hispanic literature and culture, colonial Hispanic literature and culture, transatlantic American studies, European Enlightenment studies, and modernity studies.

Writing the Americas in Enlightenment Spain

Writing the Americas in Enlightenment Spain PDF Author: Thomas C. Neal
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611488311
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
How did literary discourse about empire contribute to discussions about the implications of modernity and progress in eighteenth-century Spain? Writing the Americas seeks to answer this question by examining how novels, plays and short stories imagined and contested core notions about enlightened knowledge. Expanding upon recent transatlantic and postcolonial approaches to Spain's Enlightenment that have focused mostly on historiographical and scientific texts, this book disputes the long-standing perception of the Spanish Enlightenment as an "imitative" movement best defined best by its similarities with French and British contexts. Instead, through readings of major and minor texts by authors such as José Cadalso, Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Pedro Montengón and José María Blanco White, Writing the Americas argues that literary texts advanced a unique exploration of the compatibility between supposed universal principles and local histories, one which often diverged noticeably from dominant trends and patterns in Enlightenment thought elsewhere. The authors studied often drew directly from Spain's own imperial experiences to submit prevailing ideas about culture, commerce, education and political organization to scrutiny. Writing the Americas provides a new critical lens through which to reexamine the aesthetic and political content of eighteenth-century Spanish cultural production. While in the past, much of the debate about whether Spanish neoclassicism was "modern" literature has centered on formalistic qualities or romantic notions of "originality" or "subjectivity," ultimately, Writing the Americas locates the modernity of these literary works within the very ideological tensions they display towards the prevailing intellectual trends of the time. The interdisciplinary content and approach of Writing the Americas make it a valuable resource for a broad range of scholars including specialists in eighteenth-century and modern Hispanic literature and culture, colonial Hispanic literature and culture, transatlantic American studies, European Enlightenment studies, and modernity studies.

The Writing Public

The Writing Public PDF Author: Elizabeth Andrews Bond
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Elizabeth Andrews Bond scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years, shining a light on the letters to the editor. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers. Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment. Thanks to generous funding from The Ohio State University Libraries and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.

Artisanal Enlightenment

Artisanal Enlightenment PDF Author: Paola Bertucci
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300231628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France’s colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. Artisanal Enlightenment provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, Bertucci provides a groundbreaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.

The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature

The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature PDF Author: John Whalen-Bridge
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438426593
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The encounter between Buddhism and American literature has been a powerful one for both parties. While Buddhism fueled the Beat movement's resounding critique of the United States as a spiritually dead society, Beat writers and others have shaped how Buddhism has been presented to and perceived by a North American audience. Contributors to this volume explore how Asian influences have been adapted to American desires in literary works and Buddhist poetics, or how Buddhist practices emerge in literary works. Starting with early aesthetic theories of Ernest Fenollosa, made famous but also distorted by Ezra Pound, the book moves on to the countercultural voices associated with the Beat movement and its friends and heirs such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Giorno, Waldman, and Whalen. The volume also considers the work of contemporary American writers of color influenced by Buddhism, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles Johnson, and Lan Cao. An interview with Kingston is included.

The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture

The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture PDF Author: Ronnie Young
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 161148801X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literati laid the foundations for developments in imaginative writing in Scotland and further afield. In doing so, it provide a context for the widespread revaluation of the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the part that culture played in the project of Enlightenment.

The Stillbirth of Capital

The Stillbirth of Capital PDF Author: Siraj Ahmed
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804775236
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book targets one of the humanities' most widely held premises: namely, that the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for modern imperialism. It argues instead that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question. While eighteenth-century British India has not received nearly the same attention as nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, it is the place where colonial rule and Enlightenment reason first became entwined. The Stillbirth of Capital makes its case by examining every work about British India written by a major author from 1670 to 1815, a period that coincides not only with the Enlightenment but also with the institution of a global economy. In contrast to both Marxist and liberal scholars, figures such as Dryden, Defoe, Voltaire, Sterne, Smith, Bentham, Burke, Sheridan, and Scott locate modernity's roots not in the birth of capital but rather in the collusion of sovereign power and monopoly commerce, which used Indian Ocean wealth to finance the unfathomable costs of modern war. Ahmed reveals the pertinence of eighteenth-century writing to our own moment of danger, when the military alliance of hegemonic states and private corporations has become even more far-reaching than it was in centuries past.

The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820

The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820 PDF Author: Robert A. Ferguson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674023222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This concise literary history of the American Enlightenment captures the varied and conflicting voices of religious and political conviction in the decades when the new nation was formed. Robert Ferguson's trenchant interpretation yields new understanding of this pivotal period for American culture.

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Mary Seidman Trouille
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438422342
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.

Ends of Enlightenment

Ends of Enlightenment PDF Author: John Bender
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: Ritchie Robertson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062410679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1008

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Book Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.