scholarly journals Identity, anxiety, and ambiguity within the eighteenth-century representation of the slave: Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, and Phillis Wheatley

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Anne Markovic
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld

Perambulating Mice and the Confluence of Sympathy and Moral Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Shawna Lichtenwalner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth century was the locus of a burgeoning interest in animal rights. This essay examines the critical role that children’s literature had in the evolution of more consideration for animal welfare. The use of animals in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy Kilner helped create a form of animal subjectivity as a means of teaching children compassion through the creation of sympathy for nonhuman animals. By fostering compassion for the needs of so-called “dumb creatures” children could also be taught, by extension, to have more consideration for other people. In particular, Dorothy Kilner’s animal autobiography The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse offers a new way of viewing animals who are neither physical nor affectional slaves as worthy of both consideration and compassion.

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
Elizabeth Hamilton ◽  
Discourse Patterns ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women’S Writing

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth-century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790’s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830’s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This not only provides a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also provides a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres women were writing in during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730’s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women—Methodist and otherwise—modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.

Transatlantic Traffic

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-302
Author(s):  
Joseph Rezek
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Literary Celebrity ◽  
Printed Books

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century transatlantic traffic in books by analyzing one extraordinary letter by Phillis Wheatley. Written in Boston on 18 October 1773, and addressed to David Wooster, in New Haven, the letter enlists Wooster’s help selling copies of Wheatley’s book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” describes Wheatley’s manumission from slavery, and mentions a number of books Wheatley acquired during her recent trip to London, including Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope’s complete Works, and Don Quixote. Many of the books Wheatley mentions have survived with her signed inscriptions. An examination of those particular books and the letter that describes them provides a rich understanding of Wheatley’s relationship to books as a reader and published author, an enslaved and freed person, and a literary celebrity. In emphasizing the intimacy of transatlantic traffic, Wheatley’s letter suggests printed books remain “unfinished” until they change hands from one person to another.

Phillis Wheatley and the Political Work of Ekphrasis

2017 ◽  
pp. 53-79
Author(s):  
Mary Louise Kete
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Face ◽  
Revolutionary America ◽  
The Right ◽  
Educated Person

Wheatley redefines herself and her prospects by choosing to open her collection of poems with the rhetorical device of ekphrasis applied to her own situation. This act of agency asserts her equality as an educated person with men and with white people in the face of society’s claims that she—as a woman, a Negro, and a slave—is inherently inferior. She rejects the ways in which her master, the eighteenth-century evangelical clergy, a noble patron, and her publisher try to control her by defining her as their creation. Instead, her use of ekphrasis to compare her situation to those of classical literary figures such as Homer, Maecenas, Virgil, and especially Terence (a freed African slave turned playwright) invokes the classical tradition in order to assert that it inspires her radical claims of gender and racial equality. In doing so, she asked many of the same questions posed by radical elements in revolutionary America, including who has the right to define what we are or will be, and what our reputation will be? She anticipates the use of ekphrasis by familiar Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, and Hemans as way to define and claim the ethos of the poet.

Phillis Wheatley and the Affairs of State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
Political Poetry ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Political Identification ◽  
Revolutionary America

This chapter considers Phillis Wheatley as a political actor within the context of revolutionary-era Boston, and her political poetry as representative of the genre eighteenth-century readers would have known as the poem on the affairs of state. Within this larger category the chapter identifies two distinct yet related literary modes in Wheatley’s work. The first, her neoclassical poetics of political identification, engages with the revolutionary rhetoric of freedom as a means of linking the struggle of American revolutionaries with that of enslaved people in America. While this poetics of identification is rooted in a sense of optimism linked to the ethos of revolution, Wheatley simultaneously develops a poetics of opposition, which registers a lingering skepticism as to the likelihood of liberation for enslaved and free blacks in post-revolutionary America.

scholarly journals Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Year ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Good Works ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century

During the winter of scarcity of 1794, Hannah More wrote “a few moral stories,” drew up a plan for publication and distribution, and sent the package around to her evangelical and bluestocking friends. Their response was enthusiastic; even Horace Walpole abandoned his usual teasing to write back, “I will never more complain of your silence; for I am perfectly convinced that you have no idle, no unemployed moments. Your indefatigable benevolence is incessantly occupied in good works; and your head and your heart make the utmost use of the excellent qualities of both…. Thank you a thousand times for your most ingenious plan; may great success reward you!” Walpole then sent off copies of the plan to the duchess of Gloucester and other aristocratic friends. Following Wilberforce's example, such wealthy philanthropists subscribed over 1,000 pounds to support the project during its first year. Henry Thornton agreed to act as treasurer and Zachary Macaulay as agent, and the ball was rolling.In March 1795, the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts issued its first publications. Prominent evangelicals and gentry worked to distribute them to the rural poor, booksellers, and hawkers and among Sunday schools and charity children. During the Repository's three-year existence, the fifty or so tracts written by Hannah More were supplemented by contributions from fellow evangelicals Thornton, Macaulay, John Venn, and John Newton, the poet William Mason, More's literary friend Mrs. Chapone, her protégée Selina Mills, and her sisters Sally and Patty More and by reprints of old favorites by Isaac Watts and Justice John Fielding.

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dustin D. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Future State ◽  
Religious Writing ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Edward Young

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about a coming spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse-exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth-is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse-driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young-is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who continue to put it to work.

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