Money, Power, and Print
Money, Power, and Print

Author: Charles Ivar McGrath

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780874130270

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"This collection gathers the expertise of scholars in several disciplines to examine the manner in which financial and economic arguments were expressed in pamphlets, broadsides, and longer works of literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to assess to what extent the political realities of the day were informed by these debates or, alternatively, shaped by that rhetoric. The contributors to the volume draw upon an extensive variety of contemporary sources and modern analyses of the formative years of the financial revolution to reexamine many of the existing conventional ideas about the relationship between money, power, and print, and to suggest that the subject is far more complex and interrelated than most studies up to now have indicated. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the financial revolution did not occur in London in isolation from the various regions of the British Isles." "The essays address the question of how money, power, and print influenced the contemporary emergence of a radically different public finance structure in the British empire and how retrospective understanding of the results have influenced historical readings of the texts and the events. A number of contributions offer detailed analyses of particular moments or structures in the reshaping of the public financial sphere, such as the parliamentary and pamphlet debate over the establishment of the Bank of England and proposals for a land bank as an alternative. Other essays focus on broader themes illustrative of larger trends during the period, such as the Scottish support for an expedition to Madagascar to take advantage of presumed pirate treasure on the island."--BOOK JACKET.

The Secret History of Domesticity
The Secret History of Domesticity

Author: Michael McKeon

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-12-26

Total Pages: 919

ISBN-13: 0801896452

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Winner, Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards in Communication and Cultural Studies Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret History of Domesticity asks how the modern notion of the public-private relation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the modern division of knowledge, Michael McKeon narrates its pre-history along with that of its essential component, domesticity. This narrative draws upon the entire spectrum of English people's experience. At the most "public" extreme are political developments like the formation of civil society over against the state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of absolutism from monarch to individual subject. The middle range of experience takes in the influence of Protestant and scientific thought, the printed publication of the private, the conceptualization of virtual publics—society, public opinion, the market—and the capitalization of production, the decline of the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the privatization of marriage, the family, and the household, and the complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, subjectivity, and sexuality. McKeon accounts for how the relationship between public and private experience first became intelligible as a variable interaction of distinct modes of being—not a static dichotomy, but a tool to think with. Richly illustrated with nearly 100 images, including paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and a representative selection of architectural floor plans for domestic interiors, this volume reads graphic forms to emphasize how susceptible the public-private relation was to concrete and spatial representation. McKeon is similarly attentive to how literary forms evoked a tangible sense of public-private relations—among them figurative imagery, allegorical narration, parody, the author-character-reader dialectic, aesthetic distance, and free indirect discourse. He also finds a structural analogue for the emergence of the modern public-private relation in the conjunction of what contemporaries called the "secret history" and the domestic novel. A capacious and synthetic historical investigation, The Secret History of Domesticity exemplifies how the methods of literary interpretation and historical analysis can inform and enrich one another.

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740

Author: Michael McKeon

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2002-05-22

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9780801869594

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The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age.

Libel and Lampoon
Libel and Lampoon

Author: Andrew Benjamin Bricker

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0192846159

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Libel and Lampoon shows how English satire and the law mutually shaped each other during the long eighteenth century. Following the lapse of prepublication licensing in 1695, the authorities quickly turned to the courts and newly repurposed libel laws in an attempt to regulate the press. In response, satirists and their booksellers devised a range of evasions. Writers increasingly capitalized on forms of verbal ambiguity, including irony, allegory, circumlocution, and indirection, while shifty printers and booksellers turned to a host of publication ruses that complicated the mechanics of both detection and prosecution. In effect, the elegant insults, comical periphrases, and booksellers' tricks that came to typify eighteenth-century satire were a way of writing and publishing born of legal necessity. Early on, these emergent satiric practices stymied the authorities and the courts. But they also led to new legislation and innovative courtroom procedures that targeted satire's most routine evasions. Especially important were a series of rulings that increased the legal liabilities of printers and booksellers and that expanded and refined doctrines for the courtroom interpretation of verbal ambiguity, irony, and allegory. By the mid-eighteenth century, satirists and their booksellers faced a range of newfound legal pressures. Rather than disappearing, however, personal and political satire began to migrate to dramatic mimicry and caricature-acoustic and visual forms that relied less on verbal ambiguity and were therefore not subject to either the provisions of preperformance dramatic licensing or the courtroom interpretive procedures that had earlier enabled the prosecution of printed satire.

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire
The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

Author: Paddy Bullard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 744

ISBN-13: 0191043702

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Eighteenth century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century's novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period's philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This Handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire reflects developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and provides a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period's texts can come together.