Wordsworth’s self-composure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack L Hart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Positive State

Abstract This essay examines William Wordsworth’s attraction to fractious and perplexing selfhood. Attending to the often overlooked riches of the Cornell edition of Wordsworth’s poetry, I argue that the poet’s sense of the self is more than a straightforward aspiration towards organic creation. Recent scholarship has cast Wordsworth’s processes of revision as an effort to create continuity between his past and present selves. Memory, in this respect, becomes an instrument to invest back into original moments of creation. It is my contention that Wordsworth is instead fascinated by a self that cannot be drawn together neatly. I also consider the psychological contexts of Wordsworth’s writing. Contemporary theorizations of memory were sometimes too quick in reforming the fragmentary aspects of memory into a positive state of unity. Wordsworth’s poetic and compositional practices, then, challenge the stricter divisions in the eighteenth century between undesirable and splintered forms of selfhood and the more unified kinds of self, which usually rely on fulfilling a telos. Teleological views of selfhood, in Wordsworth’s eyes, are insufficient to account for the contingencies and happenstance that are natural and attractive aspects of experience. As this essay suggests, his practice of revision often thrives on the unpredictable elements of composition and drawn on by an attraction to the unknown.

The Market

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Self ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Market Institutions ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
The Right ◽  
Objective Existence

The market has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hardwired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements that allow people to recognize themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasized the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.

Language, Religion, Nation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This chapter traces the popular usage of “genius” in the nineteenth century. If genius no longer has the self-evidence that was attributed to it in the eighteenth century, this is due in part to the profligacy with which the word had come to be used. While the term is widely invoked—in fact, ever more widely so—it is rarely the subject of sustained theoretical scrutiny of the type established by aesthetics and philosophy in the previous century. The genius celebrated in this popular usage was, more often than not, a collective phenomenon linking success or supremacy with the individual character of institutional or abstract entities in a way that combined genius as ingenium with genius as the form of superlative excellence.

The Noble Cadet Corps and the “Germans,” 1730s

2019 ◽  
pp. 134-170
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Educational Institution ◽  
The Self ◽  
Elite School ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Military School ◽  
Faculty And Staff ◽  
Court Politics

This chapter explores the establishment of the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg (1731), the most important educational institution for the nobility in Russia in the eighteenth century, in the context of court politics of the era. The creation of a military school and its design might be expected to naturally follow from the needs of the army. Instead, the chapter demonstrates that the Corps served as instrument for the self-promotion efforts of its ambitious founder, Field Marshal von Münnich, and that it is due to his unique standing at the court that the school enjoyed imperial patronage and received funding on a scale unimaginable under Peter I. Once established, the Corps became a platform for the enterprising efforts of its faculty and staff and, insofar as these were recruited largely through the Pietists networks, also for their pedagogical experiments that defined the educational profile of this elite school.

The Anglican Hierarchy and the Reformation of Manners 1688–1738

1982 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Historians

Few have studied the early eighteenth-century Church. Caught between puritan triumphs and the Methodist revival, its polemics and efforts at rejuvenation have gone largely unnoticed. Those historians who have noticed describe an Anglican hierarchy lacking in talent and drive and a population devoid of piety and religious fervour. Both of these images are incorrect, as more recent scholarship has begun to suggest. Church historians now concentrate primarily on biographies of famous ecclesiastics and monographs (and articles) on some of the more lively events such as SacheverelPs trial and the Convocation controversy. But no one has systematically explored the Church's attempts to combat the decline brought about by the Toleration Act of 1689 and by its own avoidance of earlier enthusiasms.

DĀDUŠA'S STELA AND THE VEXED QUESTION OF IDENTIFYING THE MAIN ACTORS ON THE RELIEF

Iraq ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 203-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Rollinger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Near East ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence

This contribution deals with the famous stela of king Dāduša of Ešnunna (c. eighteenth century b.c.). The monument testifies to a correlation of text and image that is unique in the Ancient Near East. However, recent scholarship still disagrees on the identification of the three main actors in the top register of the stela. The paper discusses in detail the philological and epigraphic evidence and their larger contexts. It concludes that the slaying figure to the left standing on the defeated king of Qab(a)rā is Adad and the figure to the far right is the pious king of Ešnunna paying reverence to his god who guaranteed victory over his enemy.

Petrarch in Britain

2007 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Literary Legacy

Petrarch was Italy's second most famous writer (after Dante), and indeed from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries he was much better known and more influential in English literature than Dante. His Italian love lyrics constituted the major influence on European love poetry for at least two centuries from 1400 to 1600, and in Britain he was imitated by Chaucer, the Elizabethans, and other lyric poets up until the end of the eighteenth century. With Romanticism Dante ousted Petrarch from his pre-eminent position, but in our post-Romantic age, attention has now started to swing back to Petrarch. This volume is a survey of Petrarch's literary legacy in Britain. Starting with his own views of those whom he called the ‘barbari Britanni’, the volume then explores a number of key topics: Petrarch's analysis of the self; his dialogue with other classical and Italian authors; Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism in Renaissance Italy; Petrarchism in England and Scotland; and Petrarch's modern legacy in both Italy and Britain. Many important texts and poets are considered, including Giordano Bruno, Leopardi, Foscolo, Ascham, Sidney, Spenser, and Walter Savage Landor.

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