Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

2020-12-03
Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

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  • Author: Jacob Sider Jost
  • Publisher: University of Virginia Press
  • ISBN: 0813945062
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 257

Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

2020
Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

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  • Author: Jacob Sider Jost
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780813945057
  • Category : English literature
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 196

"This book shows how the multiple meanings of "interest" allowed writers in the eighteenth century to make connections among different spheres of life such as finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics"--

The Eighteenth Centuries

2018-02-02
The Eighteenth Centuries

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  • Author: David T. Gies
  • Publisher: University of Virginia Press
  • ISBN: 0813940761
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 316

Today, when "globalization" is a buzzword invoked in nearly every realm, we turn back to the eighteenth century and witness the inherent globalization of its desires and, at times, its accomplishments. During the chronological eighteenth century, learning and knowledge were intimately connected across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, yet the connections themselves are largely unstudied. In The Eighteenth Centuries, twenty-two scholars across disciplines address the idea of plural Enlightenments and a global eighteenth century, transcending the demarcations that long limited our grasp of the period’s breadth and depth. Engaging concepts that span divisions of chronology and continent, these essays address topics ranging from mechanist biology, painted geographies, and revolutionary opera to Americanization, theatrical subversion of marriage, and plantation architecture. Weaving together many disparate threads of the historical tapestry we call the Enlightenment, this volume illuminates our understanding of the interconnectedness of the eighteenth centuries.

Raving at Usurers

2016-02-04
Raving at Usurers

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  • Author: Dwight Codr
  • Publisher: University of Virginia Press
  • ISBN: 0813937817
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 256

In Raving at Usurers, Dwight Codr explores the complex intersection of religion, economics, ethics, and literature in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Codr offers an alternative to the orthodox story of secular economic modernity's emergence in this key time and place, locating in early modern anti-usury literature an "ethic of uncertainty" that viewed economic transactions as ethical to the extent that their outcomes were uncertain. Codr’s development of an "anti-financial" reading practice reveals that the financial revolution might be said to have grown out of—rather than in spite of—early modern anti-usury and Protestant ethics. Beginning with the reconstruction of a major controversy provoked by the delivery of a sermon against usury in the financial heart of London, Codr goes on to show not only how the ethic at the core of the discourse surrounding usury in the eighteenth century was culturally mediated but also how that ethic may be used as a lens to better understand major works of eighteenth-century literature. Codr offers radically new perspectives on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, examining how these novels reacted to emergent financial ways of knowing and meaning as well as how the texts formally bear out the possibility of a truly open and uncertain future. By reading the eighteenth century in terms of risk rather than certainty, Raving at Usurers offers a reassessment of what has been called the financial revolution in England and provides a revisionist account of the intimate connection between risk, ethics, and economics in the period.

British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century

2024-06-18
British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century

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  • Author: Valérie Capdeville
  • Publisher: Boydell Press
  • ISBN: 9781837651283
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

This innovative collection explores how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The contributors use a wide range of sources - from city plans to letter-writing manuals, from the writings of Edmund Burke to poems and essays about the social practices of the tea table, and a variety of methodological approaches to explore philosophical, political and social aspects of the emergence of British sociability in this period. They create a rounded picture of sociability as it happened in public, private and domestic settings - in Masonic lodges and radical clubs, in painting academies and private houses - and compare specific examples and settings with equivalents in France, bringing out for instance the distinctively homo-social and predominantly masculine form of British sociability, the role of sociabilitywithin a wider national identity still finding its way after the upheaval of civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and the almost unique capacity of the British model of sociability to benefit from its own apparent tensions and contradictions.

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

2006-10-15
Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

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  • Author: Lynn Festa
  • Publisher: JHU Press
  • ISBN: 0801889340
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 311

In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire. Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation. Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.

Against Better Judgment

2022-06-06
Against Better Judgment

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  • Author: Thomas Salem Manganaro
  • Publisher: University of Virginia Press
  • ISBN: 0813947316
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 296

Robinson Crusoe recognizes it is foolish to leave for the open seas; nevertheless, he boards the ship. William Wordsworth of The Prelude sees the immense poetic task ahead of him, but instead of beginning work, he procrastinates by going for a walk. Centering on this sort of intentionally irrational action, originally defined as " akrasia" by the ancient Greeks and "weakness of will" in early Christian thought, Against Better Judgment argues that the phenomenon takes on renewed importance in the long eighteenth century. In treating human minds and bodies as systems and machines, Enlightenment philosophers did not account for actions that may be undermotivated, contradictory, or self-betraying. A number of authors, from Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen and John Keats, however, took up the phenomenon in inventive ways. Thomas Manganaro traces how English novelists, essayists, and poets of the period sought to represent akrasia in ways philosophy cannot, leading them to develop techniques and ideas distinctive to literary writing, including new uses of irony, interpretation, and contradiction. In attempting to give shape to the ways people knowingly and freely fail themselves, these authors produced a new linguistic toolkit that distinguishes literature’s epistemological advantages when it comes to writing about people.

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera

2009-06-25
The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera

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  • Author: Anthony R. DelDonna
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 0521873584
  • Category : Music
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 343

The perfect accompaniment to courses on eighteenth-century opera for both students and teachers, this Companion is a definitive reference resource.

Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century

2022-01-14
Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century

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  • Author: Jennifer Milam
  • Publisher: Rutgers University Press
  • ISBN: 1644532344
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 241

This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two strands of interest are explored by the individual authors. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist's physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Through a consideration of the material formation of concepts, this book explores questions that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, and designed forms. In doing so, it introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

2011
Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

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  • Author:
  • Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
  • ISBN: 0807834874
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 306

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America