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The collection is in honor of Mary Waldron, a founder member of the Women's Studies Group, whose distinguished scholarship is exemplified in the first chapter, and whose generous encouragement of other specialists in feminist studies in the long eighteenth century.
Exploring the metamorphoses of the body in the eighteenth-century Robinsonade as a crucial aspect of the genre’s ideologies, Castaway Bodies offers focused readings of intriguing, yet often forgotten, novels: Peter Longueville’s The English Hermit (1727), Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins (1751) and The Female American (1767) by an anonymous author. The book shows that by rewriting the myths of the New Adam, the Androgyne and the Amazon, respectively, these novels went beyond, though not completely counter to, the politics of conquest and mastery that are typically associated with the Robinsonade. It argues that even if these narratives could still be read as colonial fantasies, they opened a space for more consistent rejections of the imperial agenda in contemporary castaway fiction.
Equestrian ballets (balletti a cavallo), although little known today, emerged as valued dramatic entertainments in early modern Europe, capable of demonstrating the wealth and magnificence of the patrons who commissioned them as well as the horsemanship and military skills of the noblemen who rode in them. Although the horse ballet did not originate in Florence, that city--and its ruling grand dukes, the Medici--acquired a reputation for excellence in the genre. Between 1608 and 1686, the court commissioned horse ballets to commemorate important state events such as Medici weddings or visits by foreign visitors. In Singing of Arms and Men, author Kelley Harness undertakes the first comprehen...
Top scholars in eighteenth-century studies examine the significance of the parallel devaluations of women's culture and popular culture by looking at theatres and actresses; novels, magazines, and cookbooks; and populist politics, dress, and portraiture.
"Regina Hewitt enlists analogies between the "symbolic interactions" prompted by the selected writers and the concepts of "symbolic interaction" still evolving from the sociology of Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, and others. These practitioners recover a belief in the social efficacy of literature that was accepted during the predisciplinary Romantic Era but contested throughout much of the twentieth century. Hewitt's revisionist readings advocate the renewal of literary interventionism in our post-disciplinary age, and demonstrate the active involvement of Baillie, Scott and Landor in contemporary social and legal reform."--BOOK JACKET.
English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explores the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. Chapters in this book discuss anecdotes about actors, actresses, musicians, and other theatre people.
This groundbreaking study examines the vexed and unstable relations between the eighteenth-century novel and the material world. Rather than exploring dress's transformative potential, it charts the novel's vibrant engagement with ordinary clothes in its bid to establish new ways of articulating identity and market itself as a durable genre. In a world in which print culture and textile manufacturing traded technologies, and paper was made of rags, the novel, by contrast, resisted the rhetorical and aesthetic links between dress and expression, style and sentiment. Chloe Wigston Smith shows how fiction exploited women's work with clothing - through stealing, sex work, service, stitching, and the stage - in order to revise and reshape material culture within its pages. Her book explores a diverse group of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney and Mary Robinson.
Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Jonathan Swift. The law of property in early modern England established relations for men and women that artificially constructed, altered, and ended their connections with the material world, and the land they lived upon. The cultural role of land and law in a changing economy embracing new forms of property became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into the English novel. Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by England's Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s.
In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their...
Canon Vs. Culture explores the consequences of one of the main educational shifts of the last quarter century-- the changes from academic inquiry conducted through a selected list of accepted authorities to an investigation of the cultural operations of an entire society.