Download or read book Perilous Chastity written by Laurinda S. Dixon and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bearing such titles as The Doctor's Visit or The Lovesick Maiden, certain seventeenth-century Dutch paintings are familiar to museum browsers: an attractive young woman—well dressed, but pale and listless—reclines in a chair, languishes in bed, or falls to the floor in a faint. Weathered crones or impish boys leer suggestively in the background. These paintings traditionally have been viewed as commentary on quack doctors or unmarried pregnant women. The first book to examine images of women and illness in the light of medical history, Perilous Chastity reveals a surprising new interpretation. In an engaging analysis enhanced by abundant illustrations-including eight pages of color plates—Laurinda S. Dixon shows how paintings reflect changing medical theories concerning women. While she illuminates a tradition stretching from antiquity to the present, she concentrates on art from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and particularly on paintings from seventeenth-century Leiden. Dixon suggests how the assumptions of a predominantly male medical establishment have influenced prevailing notions of women's social place. She traces the evolution of the belief that women's illnesses were caused by "hysteria," so named in ancient Greece after the notion that the uterus had a tendency to wander in the body. All women were considered prone to hysteria-strong emotions, idleness, intellectual activity, or unladylike pursuits could cause it—but it was most commonly diagnosed among celibates. Analyzing paintings of women's sickrooms by Jan Steen, Dirck Hals, Gabriel Metsu, Jacob Ochtervelt, Godfried Schalcken, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Franz van Mieris, Dixon perceives metaphoric identifications of the womb as the source of illness. She also documents changing fashions in cures for hysteria and discusses allusions to the debilitating effects of women's passions not only in paintings, but also in madrigals by John Dowland and Henry Purcell. In conclusion, Dixon argues that her study has strong ramifications of attitudes towards women and illness today. She takes up images in twentieth-century culture as well and calls attention to a resurgence of female "hysteria" after World War II.

Download or read book Enlightenment Crossings written by George Sebastian Rousseau and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by J. C. D. Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment studies are currently in a state of flux, with unresolved arguments among its adherents about its dates, its locations, and the contents of the 'movement'. This book cuts the Gordian knot. There are many books claiming to explain the Enlightenment, but most assume that it was a thing. J. C. D. Clark shows what it actually was, namely a historiographical concept. Currently 'the Enlightenment' is a term widely accepted across popular culture and in a variety of academic disciplines, notably history, philosophy, political theory, political science, literary studies, and theology; Clark calls for a fundamental reconsideration in each. The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each--and, more broadly, between the five societies--has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth. Without the concept, people at the time were unable to act in ways that would have created the Enlightenment as a coherent movement. Since the conventional account has held that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon, the idea could be used as a component of what has been called a 'civil religion': a summing up of the myths of origin, aims, and essential values of a society from which dissent is not permitted. An appreciation that it was instead a historiographical concept undermines, in turn, the idea that there was any great transition to what came to be called 'modernity'.

Download or read book Enlightenment Borders written by George Sebastian Rousseau and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Placing the Enlightenment written by Charles W. J. Withers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

Download or read book Perilous Futures written by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his death, the writings of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) have been debated, cited, and adopted by political and legal thinkers on both the left and right with increasing frequency, though not without controversy given Schmitt's unwavering support for National Socialism before and during World War II. In Perilous Futures, Peter Uwe Hohendahl calls for critical scrutiny of Schmitt's later writings, the work in which Schmitt wrestles with concerns that retain present-day relevance: globalization, asymmetrical warfare, and the shifting international order. Hohendahl argues that Schmitt's work seems to offer solutions to these present-day issues, although the ambiguity of his beliefs means that Schmitt's later work is a problematic guide. Focusing on works Schmitt published after the war—including The Nomos of the Earth, Theory of the Partisan and Political Theology II—as well as his posthumously published diaries, Hohendahl reads these works critically against the backdrop of their biographical and historical contexts, he charts the shift in Schmitt's perspective from a German nationalist focus to a European and then international agenda, while attending to both the conceptual and theoretical continuities with his prewar work and addressing the tension between the specific circumstances in which Schmitt was writing and the later international appropriation. Crossing disciplines of history, political theory, international relations, German studies, and political philosophy, Hohendahl brings Schmitt's later writings into contemporary discourse and forces us to reexamine what we believe about Carl Schmitt.

Download or read book The Unfinished Enlightenment written by Joanna Stalnaker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration—rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields—has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.

Download or read book The Wilde Century written by Alan Sinfield and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how the characters in Oscar Wilde's plays, though not specifically gay, epitomize today's image of the effeminate male, how they relate to British theatrical fops and other characters since early modern times, how the representation of same-sex passion was altered by Wilde's expose and trial as a homosexual, and how the stereotype of the gay man became established in the 20th century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Military Enlightenment written by Christy L. Pichichero and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Military Enlightenment brings to light a radically new narrative both on the Enlightenment and the French armed forces from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Christy Pichichero makes a striking discovery: the Geneva Conventions, post-traumatic stress disorder, the military "band of brothers," and soldierly heroism all found their antecedents in the eighteenth-century French armed forces. Readers of The Military Enlightenment will be startled to learn of the many ways in which French military officers, administrators, and medical personnel advanced ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, and social justice.

Download or read book The Stoie Philosophy written by Gilbert Murray and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Dangerous Liberty written by James D. Garrison and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Gray's An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard enjoyed extraordinary popular success in Europe, where it was widely translated, imitated, adapted, and in various ways assimilated into the continental literatures. The history of the Elegy's circulation on the continent demonstrates the importance of the poem to the romantic generation of European poets, while appreciation of this history serves to illuminate modern critical approaches to the poem's often uncertain or ambiguous meaning.

Download or read book Nervous Acts written by G. Rousseau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-11-02 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays demonstrate the sweeping influence of the human nervous system on the rise of literature and sensibility in early modern Europe. The brain and nerves have usually been treated as narrow topics within the history of science and medicine. Now George Rousseau, an international authority on the relations of literature and medicine, demonstrates why a broader context is necessary. The nervous system was a crucial factor in the rise of recent civilization. More than any other body part, it holds the key to understanding how far back the strains and stresses of modern life - fatigue, depression, mental illness - extend.

Download or read book Bodies Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present written by Kate Fisher and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

Download or read book Imagining Sex written by Sarah Toulalan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Sex is a study of pornographic writing in seventeenth-century England. It explores a wide variety of written material from the period to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not a discrete genre, nor was it one that was usually subject at this time to suppression. Pornographic writing was a widespread feature of a range of texts, including both popular literature (ballads, news-sheets, court reports, small books, and pamphlets) as well as poetry, drama and more specialised medical books. The book analyses representations of sex, sexuality and eroticism in historical context to explore contemporary thinking about these issues, but also about broader cultural concerns and shifts in attitudes. It questions both modern feminist and psychoanalytical interpretations of pornography, arguing that these approaches are neither appropriate nor helpful to an understanding of seventeenth-century material. Through discussions of sex and reproduction, homosexuality, flagellation, voyeurism, and humour, the book explores the nature of early modern sexual desire and arousal and explores their relationship to contemporary understandings about how the body worked. Imagining Sex presents a radically new interpretation of pornography in this period, arguing that concerns about fertility were at the heart of representations of bodies and sex, so that images of pleasure were entwined with ideas about conception and reproduction. It also shows that these texts legitimized the (sexual) pleasure of the reader by highlighting the pleasure of looking and the incitement to sexual action that it provided.

Download or read book Perverse Romanticism written by Richard C. Sha and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

Download or read book The Lord Cornbury Scandal written by Patricia U. Bonomi and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two centuries, Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury--royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708--has been a despised figure, whose alleged transgressions ranged from raiding the public treasury to scandalizing his subjects by parading through the streets of New York City dressed as a woman. Now, Patricia Bonomi offers a challenging reassessment of Cornbury. She explores his life and experiences to illuminate such topics as imperial political culture; gossip, Grub Street, and the climate of slander; early modern sexual culture; and constitutional perceptions in an era of reform. In a tour de force of scholarly detective work, Bonomi also reappraises the most "conclusive" piece of evidence used to indict Cornbury--a celebrated portrait, said to represent the governor in female dress, that hangs today in the New-York Historical Society. Stripping away the many layers of "the Cornbury myth," this innovative work brings to life a fascinating man and reveals the conflicting emotions and loyalties that shaped the politics of the First British Empire. "A tour de force of historical detection.--Tim Hilchey, New York Times Book Review "Bonomi's book is more than an exoneration of Cornbury. It is a case study of what she aptly calls the politics of reputation." --Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books "A fascinating, authoritative glimpse into the seamy underside of imperial politics in the late Stuart era.--Timothy D. Hall, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography "An intriguing detective story that....casts light upon the operation of political power in the past and the nature of history writing in the present.--Alan Taylor, New Republic For more than two centuries, Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury--royal governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708--has been a despised figure whose alleged transgressions ranged from looting the colonial treasury to public cross dressing in New York City. Stripping away the many layers of "the Cornbury myth," Patricia Bonomi offers a challenging reassessment of this fascinating figure and of the rough and tumble political culture of the First British Empire--with its muckraking press, salacious gossip, and conflicting imperial loyalties. -->

Download or read book Botany sexuality and women s writing 1760 1830 written by Sam George and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women’s engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. The result is groundbreaking: the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women’s writing — the botanical poem with scientific notes. The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women’s writing, or the relationship between literature and science.