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The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster
This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized. A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect hu...
Jews in an Illusion of Paradise
The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.
A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse
Through studies of beheaded Irish traitors, smugglers hung in chains on the English coast, suicides subjected to the surgeon's knife in Dresden and the burial of executed Nazi war criminals, this volume provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment. The chapters 'Introduction: A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse' and 'The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England' are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Enlightened Nightscapes
This volume brings together eleven case studies that address how the night became visible in the long and global eighteenth century through different mediums and in different geographical contexts. Situated on the eve of the introduction of artificial lighting, the long eighteenth century has much to say about night’s darkness and brilliance. The eighteenth century has been bound up epistemologically with images of light, reason, and order. Night and day, light and darkness, reason and mystery, however, are not necessarily at odds in the eighteenth century. In their analysis of narratives, poetry, urban spaces, music, the visual arts, and geological phenomena, the essays provide various fr...
Glozel
Alice Gerard has crossed the Atlantic a dozen times in the last ten years in her efforts to help solve the mystery of the controversial French site of Glozel, which has been called the "Dreyfus Affair" of archaeology. Accusations of fraud made by members of the archaeological establishment have contributed to the stormy history of the site during the last 80 years. Glozel describes the exhaustive attempts Alice and her husband have made, working with other researchers, to understand the tombs, the tablets covered with unknown writing, the bones engraved with reindeer, and the phallic idols found at the site. In the process the Gerards made and lost good friends, became informed about a number of esoteric subjects, and finally developed a theory that might explain Glozel. The story is not finished; they hope the site will be recognized as authentic while Emile Fradin, who discovered the first artifacts in 1924, is still alive.
Tobias Smollett, Scotland's First Novelist
Takes a look at issues raised not only in Smollett's novels, for which he is usually remembered, but also in other works of this prolific Scottish author.
Hysterical Men
Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity - he basis for patriarchal rule - in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. This book boldly challenges this triumphant vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it.
William Godwin
William Godwin has long been known for his literary connections as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, the friend of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, the mentor of the young Wordsworth, Southey, and Shelley, and the opponent of Malthus. Godwin has been recently recognized, however, as the most capable exponent of philosophical anarchism, an original moral thinker, a pioneer in socialist economics and progressive education, and a novelist of great skill. His long life straddled two centuries. Not only did he live at the center of radical and intellectual London during the French Revolution, he also commented on some of the most significant changes in British history. ...
Print and the Celtic Languages
This book is a study of the print cultures of the four principal Celtic languages — Irish, Welsh, Gaelic and Breton — in the crucial period between 1700 and 1900. Over the past four centuries, the Celtic languages of northwest Europe have followed contrasting paths of maintenance and decline. This was despite their common lack of official recognition and use, and their common distance from the centres of political power. This volume analyses publishing, circulation and reading in the four languages, particularly at a popular level, showing the different levels of overall activity as well as the distinctions in the types of printed texts between regions. The approach is a broad one, considering all printed books down to very small cheap formats. It explores the interactions between the different regions and the continuation of print culture within diasporic communities. This volume will appeal to book historians, to scholars of the four languages and their literature, and to students of Celtic studies.
Rushing Into Floods
The dramatic representation of maritime spaces, characters and plots in Restoration and early eighteenth-century English theatres served as a crucial discursive negotiation of a burgeoning empire. This study focuses on staging the sea in a period of growing maritime, commercial and colonial activity, a time when the prominence of the sea and shipping was firmly established in the very fabric of English life. As theatres were re-established after the Restoration, playhouses soon became very visible spaces of cultural activity and important locales for staging cultural contact and conflict. Plays staging the sea can be read as central in representing the budding maritime empire to metropolitan audiences, as well as negotiating political power and knowledge about the other. The study explores well-known plays by authors such as Aphra Behn and William Wycherley alongside a host of more obscure plays by authors such as Edward Ravenscroft and Charles Gildon as cultural performances for negotiating cultural identity and difference in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
