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Reconstructs the distinctive relationship between the house and masculinity in the eighteenth century; adds a missing piece to the history of the home, uncovering the hopes and fears men had for their homes and families. Reveals how the public identity of men has always depended, to a considerable extent, upon the roles they performed within doors.
Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.
Counterfeit Capital is a comparative and interdisciplinary study exploring the unexpected yet essential relationship between irony and capital in the texts of Baudelaire and Marx. It argues for the renewed relevance of their work to contemporary thinking about the place of aesthetic and cultural experience in social and political life and articulates their poetic and philosophical innovations with their political statements in new and powerful ways. Through readings of Baudelaire's poetry and prose and Marx's Capital, this book illuminates their ongoing contribution to our understanding of themes and topics at the forefront of contemporary theoretical debate, including the effects of new tec...
The Spiritual Lives and Manuscript Cultures of Eighteenth-Century English Women explores the vital and unexplored ways in which women's life writings acted to undergird, guide, and indeed shape religious communities. Through an exploration of various significant but understudied personal relationships- including mentorship by older women, spiritual friendship, and care for nonbiological children-the book demonstrates the multiple ways in which women were active in writing religious communities. The women discussed here belonged to communities that habitually communicated through personal writing. At the same time, their acts of writing were creative acts, powerful to build and shape religiou...
Stories of transgression–Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve—may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to...
This book explores new questions and approaches to the rise of autobiographical writing since the early modern period. What motivated more and more men and women to write records of their private life? How could private writing grow into a bestselling genre? How was this rapidly expanding genre influenced by new ideas about history that emerged around 1800? How do we explain the paradox of the apparent privacy of publicity in many autobiographies? Such questions are addressed with reference to well-known autobiographies and an abundance of newfound works by persons hitherto unknown, not only from Europe, but also the Near East, and Japan. This volume features new views of the complex field of historical autobiography studies, and is the first to put the genre in a global perspective.
Again and again debates are focussing on issues around the supposed interference between political and economic system, rejecting the current dominance of 'economic thinking'. As justified many contemporary critical voices are, they make us occasionally forget that a more thorough consideration does have to deal with two major issues if it aims on progressive politics: * suggesting that economic development is increasingly controlled by political decisions means that the entire system and 'its composition' itself underwent a fundamental change - finally, capitalism had been the victory of 'economic law' over 'political law'. * subsequently we have to reconsider against this background also t...
Explores the relationship between the transition to capitalism in early modern England and the many literary innovations that emerged within the period.
Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.
At one major publishing house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. While this joke is an obvious exaggeration, there is a certain amount of truth that with each advance in technology, with each printing innovation or invention, a similar death dynamic occurred. This was most noticeable during the tumultuous years of the eighteenth century when a veritable flood of printing techniques, business practices, reading formats, and sources for reading material was introduced. The cultural reaction to each new technological change, while not exactly the same in all respects, exhibited a series of characteristics that closely mirrored each other. In each case, readers reacted in various ways against the innovation and supported the traditional publishing industry and, in their reaction, created, modified, and maintained a sense of their own identity.