Providing imaginatively contextualized close readings, this study focuses on three key eighteenth-century writers - Haywood, Hill and Fowke. Wilputte traces the development of the passionate language of these writers whose lives, writing careers, and interests intersected from 1720 to 1724 in the "Hillarian" coterie.
This book assesses the mediating role played by 'affections' in eighteenth-century contestations about reason and passion, questioning their availability and desirability outside textual form. It examines the formulation and idealization of this affective category in works by Isaac Watts, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Hays, William Godwin, Helen Maria Williams, and William Wordsworth. Part I outlines how affections are invested with utopian potential in theology, moral philosophy, and criticism, re-imagining what it might mean to know emotion. Part II considers attempts of writers at the end of the period to draw affections into literature as a means of negotiating a middle way between realism and idealism, expressivism and didacticism, particularity and abstraction, subjectivity and objectivity, femininity and masculinity, radicalism and conservatism, and the foreign and the domestic.
Passion and Control explores Dutch architectural culture of the eighteenth century, revealing the central importance of architecture to society in this period and redefining long-established paradigms of early modern architectural history. Architecture was a passion for many of the men and women in this book; wealthy patrons, burgomasters, princes and scientists were all in turn infected with architectural mania. It was a passion shared with artists, architects and builders, and a vast cast of Dutch society who contributed to a complex web of architectural discourse and who influenced building practice. The author presents a rich tapestry of sources to reconstruct the cultural context and meaning of these buildings as they were perceived by contemporaries, including representations in texts, drawings and prints, and builds on recent research by cultural historians on consumerism, material culture and luxury, print culture and the public sphere, and the history of ideas and mentalities.
The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.
Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.
Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms. Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.
At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America. From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.
"Historicizes British women's relationships with other women through the medium of commemorative writing over the course of the long eighteenth century. Featuring archival discoveries, the contributions in this volume trace female networks, friendships, rivalries, and competition and uncover the material record of women's honor"--
This first critical collection on Delarivier Manley revisits the most heated discussions, adds new perspectives in light of growing awareness of Manley’s multifaceted contributions to eighteenth-century literature, and demonstrates the wide range of thinking about her literary production and significance. While contributors reconsider some well-known texts through her generic intertextuality or unresolved political moments, the volume focuses more on those works that have had less attention: dramas, correspondence, journalistic endeavors, and late prose fiction. The methodological approaches incorporate traditional investigations of Manley, such as historical research, gender theory, and comparative close readings, as well as some recently influential theories, like geocriticism and affect studies. This book forges new paths in the many underdeveloped directions in Manley scholarship, including her work’s exploration of foreign locales, the power dynamics between individuals and in relation to states, sexuality beyond heteronormativity, and the shifting operations and influences of genre. While it draws on previous writing about Manley’s engagement with Whig/Tory politics, gender, and queerness, it also argues for Manley’s contributions as a writer with wide-ranging knowledge of both the inner sanctums of London and the outer developing British Empire, an astute reader of politics, a sophisticated explorer of emotional and gender dynamics, and a flexible and clever stylist. In contrast to the many ways Manley has been too easily dismissed, this collection carefully considers many points of view, and opens the way for new analyses of Manley’s life, work, and vital contributions to the full range of forms in which she wrote.