Download or read book Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century written by Jacob Sider Jost and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

Download or read book Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century written by Veronica Kelly and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve scholars from the fields of English, French, and German literature here examine the complex ways in which the human body becomes the privileged semiotic model through which eighteenth-century culture defines its political and conceptual centers. In making clear that the deployment of the body varies tremendously depending on what is meant by the 'human body', the essays draw on popular literature, poetics and aesthetics, garden architecture, physiognomy, beauty manuals, pornography and philosophy, as well as on canonical works in the genres of the novel and the drama.

Download or read book The Power of Objects in Eighteenth Century British America written by Jennifer Van Horn and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

Download or read book Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century written by Susan Naquin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the eighteenth century, China's new Manchu rulers consolidated their control of the largest empire China had ever known. In this book Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski draw on the most recent research to provide a unique overview and reevaluation of the social history of China during this period--one of the most dynamic periods in China's early modern era. "A lucid, original, and scholarly summary of the social, economic, and demographic history of China's last great period of glory. This will be an important book for students of Chinese history."--Jonathan Spence, Yale University "Engaging, complex, and elegantly written. . . . Absorbing and valuable: a thorough, unique, and richly detailed account of the social forms and cultural and religious life of the people."--Choice " An] interesting and well-informed survey of China between about 1680 and 1820."--W.J.F. Jenner, Asian Affairs "I would be a very odd scholar or general reader who could not derive profit from reading this elegant and painstaking survey of the social, cultural, and economic life of the Qing empire in its apparent prime. . . . A superb survey which readers may absorb and cherish."--Alexander Woodside, Pacific Affairs "A highly readable synthesis of recent secondary literature on the subject."--William S. Atwell, Journal of Asian Studies "Their coverage is comprehensive and their writing is clear and lucid. reading this book obtains one a very broad, yet penetrative, view of Chinese society at the time."--Alan P.L. Liu, Asian Thought & Society "The ground covered by this book is vast. . . . Its very breadth conveys with great clarity the extent of current knowledge of premodern China: it also serves as an excellent introduction to the social history of the Qing dynasty."--Hugh D.R. Baker, China Quarterly "This is a most challenging work and ambitious work. . . . Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century give both the general reader and also the historian who does not study China a tool for grounding himself or herself in the basic patterns and trends that could be found in eighteenth century China as well as in the problems the specialists are now exploring. The book is also of great value to students of traditional and modern China, for it serves to synthesize much of the new literature on China in the High Qing. Thus it serves the 'China hand' as a state of the field essay that shows just where we are even as it suggests directions for future research."--Murray A. Rubinstein, American Asian Review "This excellent book provides an intelligent summary our rapidly changing understanding of Chinese society in a crucial century of political stability and economic and demographic expansion. Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski are distinguished contributors to the field, energetically engaged in its multinational communication networks."--John E. Wills, Jr., American Historical Review

Download or read book European Art of the Eighteenth Century written by Daniela Tarabra and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Art Through the Century series introduces readers to important visual vocabulary of Western art."--Back cover.

Download or read book The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century written by Richard L. Bushman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating study of America’s agricultural society during the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Founding eras In the eighteenth century, three†‘quarters of Americans made their living from farms. This authoritative history explores the lives, cultures, and societies of America’s farmers from colonial times through the founding of the nation. Noted historian Richard Bushman explains how all farmers sought to provision themselves while still actively engaged in trade, making both subsistence and commerce vital to farm economies of all sizes. The book describes the tragic effects on the native population of farmers’ efforts to provide farms for their children and examines how climate created the divide between the free North and the slave South. Bushman also traces midcentury rural violence back to the century’s population explosion. An engaging work of historical scholarship, the book draws on a wealth of diaries, letters, and other writings—including the farm papers of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington—to open a window on the men, women, and children who worked the land in early America.

Download or read book Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century written by Christina Lupton and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did eighteenth-century readers find and make time to read? Books have always posed a problem of time for readers. Becoming widely available in the eighteenth century—when working hours increased and lighter and quicker forms of reading (newspapers, magazines, broadsheets) surged in popularity—the material form of the codex book invited readers to situate themselves creatively in time. Drawing on letters, diaries, reading logs, and a range of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels, Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century concretely describes how book-readers of the past carved up, expanded, and anticipated time. Placing canonical works by Elizabeth Inchbald, Henry Fielding, Amelia Opie, and Samuel Richardson alongside those of lesser-known authors and readers, Lupton approaches books as objects that are good at attracting particular forms of attention and paths of return. In contrast to the digital interfaces of our own moment and the ephemeral newspapers and pamphlets read in the 1700s, books are rarely seen as shaping or keeping modern time. However, as Lupton demonstrates, books are often put down and picked up, they are leafed through as well as read sequentially, and they are handed on as objects designed to bridge temporal distances. In showing how discourse itself engages with these material practices, Lupton argues that reading is something to be studied textually as well as historically. Applying modern theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, and Bernard Stiegler, Lupton offers a rare phenomenological approach to the study of a concrete historical field. This compelling book stands out for the combination of archival research, smart theoretical inquiry, and autobiographical reflection it brings into play.

Download or read book The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth century Philosophers written by Carl Lotus Becker and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers "demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials." In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at the book's continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. "Will remain a classic--a beautifully finished literary product."--Charles A. Beard, American Historical Review "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers remains one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment. . . . [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come."--Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword

Download or read book Modes of Play in Eighteenth Century France written by Fayçal Falaky and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.

Download or read book Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth Century America written by and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

Download or read book Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century written by Tanya M. Caldwell and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material “from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs,” each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Download or read book Daily Life in 18th Century England written by Kirstin Olsen and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes various aspects of life in eighteenth-century England, discussing politics, class and race, family, housing, clothing, work and wages, education, food and drink, behavior, hygiene, and other topics.

Download or read book The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse written by Roger Lonsdale and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No previous anthology has succeeded in illustrating so thoroughly the kinds of verse actually written in the eighteenth century. The familiar tradition is fully represented by selections from such poets as Pope, Swift, Tomson, Gray, Smart, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake. In addition, the anthology includes verse by many forgotten writers, both men and women, from all levels of society. Although they have never figured in conventional literary history, they wrote humorous, idiosyncratic, and graphic verse about their personal experience and the world around them, in a way that should challenge received ideas about the period's restraints and inhibitions.

Download or read book I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century written by John Andrew Rice and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Andrew Rice’s autobiography, first published to critical acclaim in 1942, is a remarkable tour through late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. When the book was suppressed by the publisher soon after its appearance because of legal threats by a college president described in the book, the nation lost a rich first-person historical account of race and class relations during a critical period—not only during the days of Rice’s youth, but at the dawn of the civil rights movement. I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century begins with Rice’s childhood on a South Carolina plantation during the post-Reconstruction era. Later Rice moved to Great Britain when he won a Rhodes scholarship, then to the University of Nebraska to accept a professorship. In 1933 he founded Black Mountain College, a legendary progressive college in North Carolina that uniquely combined creative arts, liberal education, self-government, and a work program. Rice’s observations of social and working conditions in the Jim Crow South, his chronicle of his own fading southern aristocratic family, including its famous politicians, and his acerbic portraits of education bureaucrats are memorable and make this book a resource for scholars and a pleasure for lay readers. Historical facts are leavened with wit and insight; black-white relations are recounted with relentless and unsentimental discernment. Rice combines a sociologist’s eye with a dramatist’s flair in a unique voice. This Southern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Mark Bauerlein and an afterword by Rice’s grandson William Craig Rice, exposing a new generation of readers to John Andrew Rice’s incisive commentaries on the American South before the 1960s and to the work of a powerful prose stylist.

Download or read book French Art of the Eighteenth Century written by Heather Eleanor MacDonald and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since 2004, the Dallas Museum of Art has been the repository of the renowned collection of eighteenth-century French art assembled by the late Michael Rosenberg. The long-term loan of these masterpieces greatly enhances the collection of European art at the Museum, and the series of scholarly lectures funded by the Foundation, the Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series, gives a powerful boost to its European art program. Those lectures, presented by top scholars in the field of European art history, are re-presented in this volume"--

Download or read book Luxury in the Eighteenth Century written by M. Berg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Luxury in the 18th Century' explores the political, economic, moral and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods, and provides a broadly-based account from a variety of perspectives, addressing key themes of economic debate, material culture, the principles of art and taste, luxury as 'female vice' and the exotic.

Download or read book The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth century Britain written by David Spadafora and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of progress stood at the very center of the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Britain, closely linked to every major facet of the British Enlightenment as well as to the economic revolutions of the period. Drawing on hundreds of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets, David Spadafora here provides the most extensive discussion ever written of this prevailing sense of historical optimism.