scholarly journals On the Highways of Literature: Herbert Croft’s Unfinished Business

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Paul Keen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Promotional Efforts ◽  
Oxford Dictionary ◽  
The Right ◽  
National Good

AbstractThis essay explores the ways that Herbert Croft’s ultimately unsuccessful literary career epitomized the late eighteenth-century world of struggling authors, pursuing their fortune along whatever paths seemed to be the most promising or, failing that, most available, across a far broader range of genres than we normally acknowledge in our accounts of professional authorship in this period. It explores Croft’s failed plans to produce what theGentleman’s Magazinecalled the “Oxford Dictionary of the English Language,” but also on his considerable efforts to promote this and other literary projects. The second half of the essay focuses on Croft’sLetter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, which was printed in early March, 1788, at the end of a trip to London, and which was intended to generate support for his dictionary project. If theLetter to Pittwas remarkable for the dexterity with which Croft aligned his argument for the importance of a particular form literary professionalism with a set of related assumptions about the connections between public virtue and the national good, its many tensions foregrounded some of the paradoxes that were implicit in this process. Like many of the newspaper ads for his other works, theLetter to Pittoffers a compelling example of the extent to which Croft’s promotional efforts resulted in more intriguing literary texts than the works they were intended to promote.

Matter, Form, Abstraction

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-202
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
New Creation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter addresses the constantly shifting forms that mediated audiences’ experiences of admired antiquities from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth. Literary texts and reproductive prints not only diffused knowledge of ancient art, but shaped new creation in literature and the visual arts, which in turn contributed to the establishment of new aesthetic norms. Through analyses of authors ranging from Lessing to Winckelmann, from Coleridge to Blake, from George Eliot to Henry James, and culminating with Ruskin and Pater, this chapter argues that the emergence of an ever-more abstract and formalist vision of antiquity was shaped by the ongoing shifts in the cultural presence of antique objects.

Social rights and duties in Babeuf and the neo-Babouvists (1786–1848)

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-553
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Roza
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Right To Education ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Right

Abstract This article examines the conception of social rights found in the writings of François-Noël Babeuf in the late eighteenth century and those of his followers, the neo-Babouvists, in the first half of the nineteenth. Both believed that social rights were to be based on natural needs, which they categorized as physical and moral: while physical needs necessitated the right to subsistence, moral needs encompassed the right to education. Babeuf and the neo-Babouvists also believed that social rights were inseparable from principles of equality and the reciprocity of rights and duties among society’s members. The neo-Babouvists developed this notion of reciprocity into the view that labour laws and the right to work constituted the legitimate and reciprocal counterparts of the property rights of employers. This balancing of property rights and workers’ rights was to be provisional, however, pending the transformation of society towards a community of goods.

The People Are King

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Forced Resettlement ◽  
The Right ◽  
Planned Towns ◽  
Resettlement Towns

The People Are King traces the transformation of Andean communities under Inca and Spanish rule. The sixteenth-century Spanish resettlement policy known as reducción was pivotal to this transformation. Modeled on the Spanish ideal of república (self-government within planned towns) and shared sovereignty with their monarch, Spaniards in the Viceroyalty of Peru forced Andeans into resettlement towns. Andeans turned the tables on forced resettlement by making the towns their own and the center of their social, political, and religious lives. Andeans made a coherent life for themselves in a complex process of ethnogenesis that blended preconquest ways of life (the ayllu) with the imposed institutions of town life and Christian religious practices. Within these towns, Andeans claimed the right to self-government, and increasingly regarded their native lords, the caciques, as tyrants. A series of microhistorical accounts in these repúblicas reveals that Andeans believed that commoner people, collectively called the común, could rule themselves. With both Andean and Spanish antecedents, this political philosophy of radical democracy was key to the Great Rebellion of the late eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on well-known leaders such as Tupac Amaru, this book demonstrates through commoner rebels’ holographic letters that it was commoner Andean people who made the late eighteenth-century a revolutionary moment by asserting their rights to self-government. In the final chapter the book follows the commoner-lead towns of the Andes from the era of independence into the present day of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

Crime and Punishment: And a Footnote on Tort

2019 ◽  
pp. 263-288
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Penal Reform ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

This chapter discusses the history of American criminal law, covering penal law and penal reform, prison, and tort. The criminal law is an important lever of power, for any government. The leaders of the American Revolution felt strongly that the British were trampling on American rights and were abusing criminal justice. The right to a fair criminal trial was a fundamental right, in their eyes. The Bill of Rights was a kind of minicode of criminal procedure. Moreover, in the late eighteenth century, scholars were rethinking the premises on which criminal law rested. Great reformers called for a more enlightened system of criminal law.

Perpetual what? Injury, Sovereignty and a Cosmopolitan View of Immigration

2011 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inés Valdez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Power Asymmetry ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
International Power ◽  
The Right

Can Kantian cosmopolitanism contribute to normative approaches to immigration? Kant developed the universal right to hospitality in the context of late eighteenth-century colonialism. He claimed that non-European countries had a sovereign right over their territory and the conditions of foreigners' visits. This sovereign prerogative limited visitors' right to hospitality. The interconnected and complementary system of right he devised is influential today, but this article argues that maintaining the complementarity of the three realms involves reconsidering its application to contemporary immigration. It situates Kant's Perpetual Peace within the context of debates about conquest and colonialism and argues that Kant's strict conception of sovereignty is justified by his concern in maintaining a realm of sovereignty that is complementary with cosmopolitanism and his prioritization of mutual agreements in each of the realms, particularly in a context of international power asymmetry. In Kant's time, European powers appropriated cosmopolitan discourses to defend their right to visit other countries and it was necessary to strengthen non-Europeans' sovereign claims. The strength and hostility of the visitors made limited hospitality and strong sovereignty act in tandem to keep away conquerors, expanding cosmopolitanism. Today, individuals from poor countries migrate to wealthier ones where they are subject to a sovereign authority that excludes them. Sovereignty and cosmopolitanism no longer work complementarily, but rather strengthen powerful state actors vis-à-vis non-citizens subject to unilateral rule. Maintaining the pre-eminence of the right to freedom, the article suggests that only through the creation of ‘cosmopolitan spaces' of politics can we reproduce today the complementarity that Kant envisioned.

The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789-1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of William Collow

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 61-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Behrendt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
English Language ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Financial Transactions

In 1929 the American Antiquarian Society published an eighty-three-page manuscript that describes commercial transactions for slaves, ivory, and gold on the Gold and Slave Coasts from 1789 to 1792. George Plimpton owned this manuscript. As it includes a slave-trading ledger of the schooner Swallow, Plimpton entitled the manuscript “The Journal of an African Slaver.” The “journal” is one of the few published documents in the English language that specifies financial transactions for slaves between European and African traders on the coast of Africa during the late eighteenth century.In his four-page introduction to the journal Plimpton stated that:The name of the ship engaged in the traffic was the schooner ‘Swallow,’ Capt. John Johnston, 1790-1792. There is a reference to a previous voyage when ‘Captain Peacock had her,’ also some abstracts of accounts kept by Capt. David McEleheran in 1789 of trade in gold, slaves and ivory on the Gold Coast. None of these names can be identified as to locality, and there is, of course, the possibility, especially taking into consideration the English nature of the cargo bartered, that the vessel was an English slaver.The journal was included with some mid-nineteenth century South Carolina plantation accounts when it was purchased at an auction in New York, thus suggesting to Plimpton that the journal's author was perhaps a “South Carolinian who made this trip to Africa.”In this research note I will identify the various vessels and traders mentioned in this manuscript by referring to the data-set I have assembled from other sources concerning the slave trade during this period. We will seethat Plimpton's “journal” is a set of account books owned by the Gold Coast agents of London and Havre merchant William Collow. I then will discuss the importance of Collow as a merchant and shipowner in the late eighteenth-century British slave trade.

Nationalism in the Renaissance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Schwyzer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
National Community ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
To Come

Although an influential school of thought locates the origins of nationalism in the late eighteenth century, the Tudor era has long been associated with the rise of English national consciousness. This chapter surveys recent studies of sixteenth-century nationalism and argues that the national community imagined in Tudor literature was in many respects more British than English. Whether or not a developed nationalist ideology was present in sixteenth-century England, the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been crucial to the development and expression of national consciousness in later eras. Indeed, it is precisely where early modern literary texts look forward to the nation as something yet to come that they speak most powerfully to nationalist sensibilities.

‘Adapted to the modern stage’: La clemenza di Tito in London

1995 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Senici
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Expressions such as ‘author’, ‘work’, ‘text’ and ‘repertory’ are used constantly in writings about Italian opera; they stand for concepts that seem uncontroversial and unproblematic. However, these terms acquired the value we currently grant them only through a long process, one inextricably linked to the century-long formation of an Italian ‘operatic repertory’ between about 1750 and 1850. At the beginning of this period, a select number of literary texts received new musical clothing each time they were revived; by its end, the text of a successful opera could not be set to music again, because music and text were indissolubly linked in the audience's perception. There were exceptions, of course, and the process of change was gradual and differed according to genre: in the late eighteenth century some drammi giocosi had European careers that lasted as long as thirty years, much longer than the most successful drammi per musica. What is more, although we can speak of a ‘repertory’. with reference to the whole of Europe or to Italy, if we narrow the focusto a single city we may have to move into the nineteenth century to amass a body of works sufficiently large to merit the term. However, the fact that this process lasted for a century, far fromdiminishing its importance, is in one sense proof of its relevance. for an understanding of Italian opera that fully embraces its cultural, social and political context, ‘facts’ will indeed last as long as a century.

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