Download or read book Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth Century Britain written by Robert W. Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-02 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of beauty in the eighteenth century, explored through philosophical texts, novels and art.
Download or read book Gender Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700 1830 written by John Styles and published by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. This book was released on 2006 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Download or read book The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth Century British Writing written by James Noggle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is taste a quick, momentary experience in the individual mind? Or something durable, shaped by slow, historical processes, affecting groups of people at different times and places? British writers in the eighteenth century believed that it was both, and the tension between these temporal poles shaped the meaning of taste in the period and set a course for aesthetics in following centuries. Focusing on works in many genres-Alexander Pope's poems, David Hume's historiography, essays by Hannah More and Anna Barbauld, and novels by Frances Burney and William Beckford-this book sees the divided temporality of taste as an unpredictable force in British writing. The eighteenth century was the age of taste. Writers considered its intense effects on individual minds as especially characteristic of the collective present of British modernity, whilst they also recognized the disturbing tendency of taste's immediacy and its historical roles to interrupt and foreclose on each other. While noting how taste's two temporal flavours may be made to agree in order to consolidate various national, social, and gendered identities, this book also demonstrates that taste's dual temporality makes it more disruptive than scholars usually think. As such, taste models a kind of critical practice that this book itself endeavours to inherit: the insistent testing of the moment of discernment and on-going patterns of thinking and feeling against each other.
Download or read book Materializing Gender in Eighteenth Century Europe written by Heidi A. Strobel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.
Download or read book The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth Century England written by David Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, Porter's readings develop new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. Illustrated with many examples of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, this is a major contribution to eighteenth-century cultural history and to the history of contact and exchange between China and the West.
Download or read book Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth Century England written by Rosemary Sweet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the considerable volume of research into various aspects of the social and economic, cultural and political history of eighteenth-century British towns, remarkably little has focused upon, or even reflected upon the distinctive experience of women in the urban context. Much of what research there is has explored the experience of laboring or impoverished women, or women of the social elite; by contrast, the essays in this collection take up the study of the participation of middling women in urban life. This volume brings into sharper focus the relationship between changes consequent upon urban development and shifts in the pattern of gender relations in the 18th century. The contributors address such themes as the extent to which to what extent urban change accelerated a redefinition of gender relations; the connections between urban growth, changing definitions of citizenship, and the emergence of the male gendered political subject; the role of women in a literate, consumer and industrializing society; the place of women's networks in the economic, political and social life of the town and the distinctive role played by women in areas such as philanthropy and business; and how the development of urban society in turn inflected contemporary conceputalizations of gender.
Download or read book Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth century Art and Culture written by Gillian Perry and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the visual arts and written texts, this book explores the nature of femininity and masculinity in 18th-century Britain and France. The activities and collective conditions of women as producers of art and culture are investigated, together with analysis of representation and the ways in which it might be gendered. This illustrated book should make an important contribution to debates on representation, constructions of sexuality and women as producers.
Download or read book Gender in Eighteenth century England written by Hannah Barker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1997 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important collection of essays draws together exciting new historical research on gender in eighteenth-century England. The book examines the experiences of women and men in public and private life and challenges the generally accepted belief that the eighteenth century saw the establishment of sexually segregated separate spheres.
Download or read book A Taste for China written by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.
Download or read book Disability in Eighteenth Century England written by David M. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of physical disability in eighteenth-century England. It assesses the ways in which meanings of physical difference were formed within different cultural contexts, and examines how disabled men and women used, appropriated, or rejected these representations in making sense of their own experiences. In the process, it asks a series of related questions: what constituted ‘disability’ in eighteenth-century culture and society? How was impairment perceived? How did people with disabilities see themselves and relate to others? What do their stories tell us about the social and cultural contexts of disability, and in what ways were these narratives and experiences shaped by class and gender? In order to answer these questions, the book explores the languages of disability, the relationship between religious and medical discourses of disability, and analyzes depictions of people with disabilities in popular culture, art, and the media. It also uncovers the ‘hidden histories’ of disabled men and women themselves drawing on elite letters and autobiographies, Poor Law documents and criminal court records. The book won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Prize in 2012 for the best book published worldwide in disability history and also inspired parts of the Radio 4 series, ‘Disability: A New History’, on which the author was historical adviser. The series gained 2.6 million listeners when it first aired in 2013.
Download or read book Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth century Britain written by Maria Semi and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. A particularly rich field of investigation, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'.
Download or read book Semantic Change and Collective Knowledge in 18th Century Britain written by John Regan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth digital investigation of several 18th-century British corpora, this book identifies shared communities of meaning in the printed British 18th century by highlighting and analysing patterns in the distribution of lexis. There are forces of attraction between words: some are more likely to keep company than others, and how words attract and repel one another is worthy of note. Charting these forces, this book demonstrates how distant reading 18th-century corpora can tell us something new, methodologically defensible and, crucially, interesting, about the most common constructions of word meanings and epistemes in the printed British 18th century. In the case studies in this book, computation brings to light some remarkable facts about collectively-produced forms of meaning, without which the most common meanings of words, and the ways of knowing that they constituted, would remain matters of conjecture rather than evidence. Providing the first investigation of collective meaning and knowledge in the British 18th century, this interdisciplinary study builds on the existing stores of close reading, praxis, and history of ideas, presenting a view constructed at scale, rather than at the level of individual texts.
Download or read book Women Writing and Travel in the Eighteenth Century written by Katrina O'Loughlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone. Moving from Ottoman courts to theatres of war, O'Loughlin shows how gender frames access to people and spaces outside Enlightenment and Romantic Britain, and how travel provides women with a powerful cultural form for re-imagining their place in the world.
Download or read book Touring and Publicizing England s Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Jocelyn Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the long 18th century, many of England's grandest country houses became known for displaying noteworthy architecture and design, large collections of sculptures and paintings, and expansive landscape gardens and parks. Although these houses continued to function as residences and spaces of elite retreat, they had powerful public identities: increasingly accessible to tourists and extensively described by travel writers, they began to be celebrated as sites of great importance to national culture. This book examines how these identities emerged, repositioning the importance of country houses in 18th-century Britain and exploring what it took to turn them into tourist attractions. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists' diaries and letters, it explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. It also questions the legacies of these early tourists: both as a critical cultural practice in the 18th century and an extraordinary and controversial influence in British culture today, country-house tourism is a phenomenon that demands investigation.
Download or read book Material Literacy in 18th Century Britain written by Serena Dyer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories. This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.
Download or read book A Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry written by Christine Gerrard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).
Download or read book The Literary Career of Mark Akenside written by Robin Dix and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book offers the fullest critical account to date of the literary career of Mark Akenside (1721-1770). In the course of the discussion, Akenside's literary achievements and his contributions to the vibrant cultural scene of the mid-eighteenth century are amply demonstrated, as well as his intellectual originality, his inventive use of source material, and his influence on poets and philosophers in the late eighteenth century and the Romantic period."--Publisher's website.
