Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture by Timothy ErwinTextual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture by Timothy Erwin Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. xviii+282pp. US$100. ISBN 978-1-61148-569-1.

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-508
Author(s):  
K.L.H. Wells
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Culture

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

Memorialising Anson, the fighting explorer: a case study in eighteenth-century naval commemoration and material culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Katherine Parker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Culture

An informative example of the conscious act of naval hero-making are the commemorative medals struck in 1768 by the brother of George Anson. Anson had died in 1762, so these medals were not only a memorial to his life, but also a deliberate attempt to control his legacy. What the medals include, and omit, offers a fascinating opportunity to examine what some thought worthy of commemoration in eighteenth-century British culture. This chapter uses the medals as a prism through which to examine the interconnections between naval careers, material culture, and the process of commemoration. In addition, the paper offers a revaluation of the historiographical role of exploration in the eighteenth century and re-positions exploration as an explicitly naval activity in the British context.

Hunting the Methodist Vixen

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Evangelical Women ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Women’S Writing

Chapter One lays out the broad conceptual stakes of the book’s argument, reviews the existing literature on Methodism, Romanticism, and women’s writing, and points to some of the modes of analysis that are pursued in the rest of the book. Furthermore, it lays out the rationale for examining women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Felicia Hemans, who would not have identified as evangelicals, in the context of evangelical women. The goal is not to trace influence, necessarily, but instead to examine how evangelical discourse came to permeate many different aspects of British culture. More broadly speaking this chapter explores of the stakes of the volume and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how specific changes to the protocols of mediation that Methodists in general, and Methodist women in particular, pioneered can be mapped onto women’s writing more broadly during the long eighteenth-century.

A POLITE AND ENLIGHTENED LONDON?

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 623-634
Author(s):  
ROSALIND CARR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
English Society ◽  
Cultural Dominance ◽  
Cultural Agency ◽  
Polite Culture ◽  
British Culture

The character of eighteenth-century English society remains a subject of debate, and diverse perspectives are particularly pronounced when it comes to the cultural influence and power of politeness. The monographs discussed below all engage with politeness in different ways. Emma Major and Sarah Apetrei explore the means by which polite culture facilitated female cultural agency, and thus follow Lawrence Klein's call to comprehend the lived experience of politeness. Taking a different tack, Simon Dickie and Vic Gatrell reject the idea that politeness enjoyed the cultural dominance ascribed to it by Klein and other historians. In Ildiko Csengei's study, the narrative of an emergent civility is challenged through an analysis of sensibility's ‘darker side’. This move towards an acceptance of the power of the impolite in British culture is also explored by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who emphasizes the power of the liberated male libertine, and broadens the scope for understanding eighteenth-century culture. Yet, an abandonment of politeness risks removing women's agency from the picture, with Major, Apetrei, and Karen O'Brien all emphasizing the importance of the feminine to politeness and virtue; in O'Brien's case, in the context of Enlightenment concepts of civility, where the feminine symbolized progress and refinement.

scholarly journals “Much, I am Sure, Depends on You”: James Fordyce’s Lessons on Female Happiness and Perfection

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Bronk
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Close Study ◽  
British Culture ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACT Conduct literature written for women has had a long tradition in British culture. According to scholars, such as Ingrid H. Tague (2002), it circulated most widely during the eighteenth century because new ideals of proper feminine behaviour and conduct developed. The Scottish Presbyterian minister and poet, James Fordyce (1720-1796), very observant of the transformations in his society as well as advocating the need to reform moral manners, likewise created a set of sermons dedicated to young women of the second half of the eighteenth century. He is worthy of close study not only because his Sermons to Young Women constitute an important yet understudied contribution to the tradition of conduct writing, but also because he records and disseminates opinions on female perfection both as a man of the church as well as the representative of his sex, thus presenting a broad scope of the official gender ideology of the eighteenth century. The proposed article engages in a close reading of Fordyce's rules and regulations pertaining to proper femininity, pointing also to the tone of his published sermon-manual and the socio-techniques used for the sake of perpetuating his ideological precepts for women. As such, the article is to prove that this popular eighteenth-century preacher, whose work was even mentioned on the pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not only offers a significant contribution to ongoing research on conduct manual tradition as well as on feminist re-readings of women’s history, but also adds more evidence to feminist claims of a purposeful campaign aimed at creating a selfaware and self-vigilant woman who almost consciously strives to become the object of masculine desire, and allegedly all for her own good.

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