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'This book presents a rigorous, hugely informative analysis of the early history of Dutch children’s literature, pedagogical developments and emerging family formations. Thoroughly researched, Dietz’s study will be essential for historians of eighteenth-century childhood, education and children’s books, both in the Dutch context and more widely.’ — Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK. ‘A rich, informative, well-documented and effectively illustrated discussion of the ways Dutch eighteenth-century educators tried to transform youth into responsible readers. It does so in a wide international context and masterfully connects this process to the radical politicization and de-po...
The authors revisit the idea that Enlightenment spearheaded secularization. This book invites all to look at the Enlightenment religiosity as founded on a merger of religious criticism and heterodoxy.
History in Dutch Studies re-considers the central role of history within the discipline of Dutch Studies as viewed from a range of specializations within the field. Contributions by scholars of Dutch history, art history, literature and linguistics all illustrate how the past, and one's theories and views of history, affect the practice of each part of the discipline. One reflection of the history of the Low Countries in "Dutch Studies" is the range of the field: it is interpreted broadly in this volume to include studies of Afrikaans as well as Dutch literature- poetry as well as prose- in light of their histories, the history of Flanders and that of the Netherlands, approaches within Dutch linguistics as well as a history of language contact and its influence on Dutch. This breadth continues in the range of institutions and nationalities that are represented. The volume presents work from major scholars from the Netherlands, Belgium, and South Africa as well as from the United States of America. These articles therefore provide a good cross-section of ongoing research in the Netherlandic Studies the world over.
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.
Culture is studied in this collection, not merely as a set of products, but in terms of the involvement of individuals and groups in the making and using of such products. A wide range of activities, from the reading and writing of poetry to watching soccer on television, is surveyed by an international group of scholars from diverse disciplines: cultural history, literary studies, sociology. Topics include the social distribution of cultural activities, populism and elitism in modern aesthetics, the nature of cultural competence and the channels through which it is acquired, the impact of electronic media on traditional modes of culturalinvolvement, the role of public institutions such as churches, schools, and libraries in stimulating participation, and the relationship between cultural participation and socialization.
Given that the dissemination of enlightened thought in Europe was mostly effected through translations, the present collection of essays focuses on how its cultural adaptation took place in various national contexts. For the first time, the theoretical model of ‘cultural transfer’ (Espagne/Werner) is applied to the eighteenth century: The intercultural dynamics of the Enlightenment become manifest in the transformation process between the original and target cultures, be it by way of acculturation, creative enhancement, or misunderstanding. Resulting in shifts of meaning, translations offer a key not just to contemporary translation practice but to the discursive network of the European Enlightenment in general. The case studies united here explore both how translations contributed to the transnational standardisation of certain key concepts, values and texts, and how they reflect national specifications of enlightened discourses. Hence, the volume contributes to Enlightenment studies, at least as much as to historical translation studies.
This volume provides the first comparative survey of the relations between the two most active book worlds in Eurasia between 1450 and 1850. Prominent scholars in book history explore different approaches to publishing, printing, and book culture. They discuss the extent of technology transfer and book distribution between the two regions and show how much book historians of East Asia and Europe can learn from one another by raising new questions, exploring remarkable similarities and differences in these regions’ production, distribution, and consumption of books. The chapters in turn show different ways of writing transnational comparative history. Whereas recent problems confronting res...
Public Offices, Personal Demands presents a novel perspective on European politics in the seventeenth-century. Its focus lies on the Dutch Republic, that surprising anomaly, often described as a miracle or enigma, admired by many during this age. This collection of essays explores one of the most fundamental questions of seventeenth-century governance: what makes a person capable for office? Contemporary viewpoints are discussed by a range of scholars from different historical disciplines. As this volume shows, debates about capability and office-holding were by no means restricted to political theorists. Scientists, citizens and merchants all discussed these matters in a similar vein. Nor was this heated discussion about who was fit govern a typically Dutch phenomenon. Because of its multifaceted and international approach, this book will appeal to both scholars and students in the fields of cultural and social history, the history of political thought, the history of early modern politics, and the history of science.
This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.
Imperfect Histories puts "imperfection" at the heart of a theory of historical representation. Ann Rigney shows how historical writing involves dealing with intractable subjects that resist our efforts to know and to shape them. Those who write history, she says, engage in an ongoing struggle to match up what they find relevant in the past with the information and interpretive models at their disposal. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of historical practice. This is especially evident in the various attempts made over the last two centuries to write an "alternative" history of everyday experience. Focusing on historical writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, Rigney analyzes a wide range of works by Walter Scott, Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry, and Thomas Carlyle. She shows how the attempt to write an alternative history brought historical writing into a close yet fraught relationship with literature. The result is a new account of that relationship as it took shape in the romantic period and as it continues to influence contemporary practices.