Conscripting Imagination: The National “Duty” of William Blake’s Art

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Saklofske
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Visual Displays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Exhibition Culture ◽  
Reproductive Processes

Abstract This paper explores William Blake’s creative and commercial positioning relative to late-eighteenth-century galleries, exhibition culture and artistic spectacle. Demonstrating a desire to reintroduce originality into reproductive processes while also embracing the exaggerated and politicised rhetoric often associated with the spectacular visual displays of exhibition societies and new media diversions, Blake confronts modern spectacle with corrective spectacles of his own, bringing clarity, detail and focus to bear on otherwise unmanageable sights. By combining the vocabulary of modern visual spectacles with a dutiful commitment to the maintenance of national strength and progress in the advertisements for and descriptions of his 1809 exhibition, Blake optimistically reconfigures his public as a homogeneously capable body of intellectual and consumer ability. Viewing his own artistic assertion as dramatic performance on national and political scales, he appeals to spectatorial intellect in an era of increasingly sensationalist visual displays, individually attempting to reconfigure the taste of his beloved “public” through a seductive hybridization of spectacular novelty and gallery traditions. However, his “failed” exhibition allows us to see the overall incompatibility between his intended functions for art on national and political fronts (the conceptual), the rhetoric of spectacle (the visual), the individualism at the heart of Blake’s revolutionary nationalism and the persistent economical/commercial foundations of this project. Blake’s vision of a direct link between the strength of artistic expression, the potential of the urban audience and the strength of a nation is complicated by the economic demands faced by the artist and the inherently commercial nature of spectacle.

Flora's Go-betweens: Nectar, Insects, and Flowers in the Romantic Natural History of Pollination

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Hankinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Plant Reproduction ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Erasmus Darwin

A boundary-crossing substance connecting flowers and insects, nectar occupied a contested position during the Romantic period, provoking debates regarding who stood most to profit from it: insects or the plants themselves? Such questions also surrounded another floral substance: pollen mediated between the plant and animal kingdoms, constituting not only a means of plant reproduction but also a food for bees. Despite these shared qualities, a direct link between nectar and the dissemination of pollen was not made until the late eighteenth century, when Kölreuter and Sprengel separately discovered the secret of their connection. Taking into consideration speculations on nectar in the writings of Erasmus Darwin, as well as discussions regarding plant-insect analogy, competition, sexuality, and nutrition, I describe how naturalists came to understand (or refused to understand) the relationships governing pollination, in the process confronting a nature far more hybrid and mediated than they initially imagined.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

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