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Invisible Hands
A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency. Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and random...
Practicing Progress
The essay reads an Enlightened and modern critique of progress in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. With numerous references to other operas and texts, and with a storyline that emphasizes inevitable, yet mutable aspects of human nature, Cosi presents an ambivalent picture of the ways in which even the most disinterested and best-informed attitude toward the past can affect the future. At the same time, the opera seems to embrace the notion of freedom of choice without rejecting tradition or repetition. The essay also comments on the performance of Cosi in Zurich in 2000, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who often works with authentic period instruments.
The Enterprise of Enlightenment
Published on the occasion of his retirement in honour of his outstanding contribution to French Enlightenment studies, this volume explores those areas of research in which David Williams has excelled and continues to excel: literary criticism, particularly Voltaire, the history of ideas, women and Enlightenment, colonial practices and revolutionary politics. It brings together a collection of essays from some of the most prestigious international names in the field and tackles subjects which expose in all their splendid diversity the enterprise - both innovation and undertaking - of the Siècle des Lumières.
Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648–1920
As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gen...
9/11: Culture, Catastrophe and the Critique of Singularity
Departing from 9/11’s spectacularity and aesthetical appeal, its eskatastrophic dimension, this book takes up the task of studying 9/11 as a mnemonic singularity, i.e. a catastrophic event that evokes or mimics, albeit in a renewed situation, the structure of past catastrophes. It investigates how 9/11 has been represented/remediated and how it has reintroduced catastrophic thinking into our conceptual framework.
Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism
While the question of how rhetoric lost authority to modern philosophical and scientific inquiry has drawn much scrutiny, we have paid less attention to how values that were once bound up with rhetoric were rearticulated after its demise. This volume explores how persuasion ceased to be the seemingly self-evident objective of rhetoric and became, instead, a variable and substantive focus for discussion in its own right. After rhetoric ceded much of its centrality to logic and empirical procedures, the significance and implications of persuasion were the subject of renewed attention in a range of different fields, including philosophy, law, poetry, novels, botany, cultural criticism, historio...
The King's Crown
Basil Guy is Professor Emeritus of French, University of California, Berkeley. A decorated World War II veteran, he is the author of several books and editions, including an outstanding translation of Charles-Joseph de Ligne Coup d'oeil sur Beloeil (University of California Press, 1986). His work reflects a wide variety of academic interests, ranging from Voltaire and Rousseau to art history and the literature of gardens, to European perceptions of China in the 18th century. He has directed and participated in directing numerous theses and dissertations in French, history, and art history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has forged enduring academic and intellectual friendships across both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. His former students teach at universities across the United States.
Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750-1764
Bankhurst examines how news regarding the violent struggle to control the borderlands of British North America between 1740 and 1760 resonated among communities in Ireland with familial links to the colonies. This work considers how intense Irish press coverage and American fundraising drives in Ireland produced empathy among Ulster Presbyterians.
Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature
This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Based on the historical premise that the view of ageing as a burden emerges as a specific narrative in the late eighteenth century, the study highlights how the changing experience of ageing is shaped by that of gender. By reading the Bildungsroman as a 'coming of age' novel, the book asks how the telling of a life in time affects individual age narratives. Bringing together the different perspectives of age and disability studies, the book argues that illness is already an important issue in the Bildungsroman's narratives of ageing. This theoretical stance provid...
Performing China
China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a model of economic and political strength, viewed by many as the greatest empire in the world. While the importance of China to eighteenth-century English consumer culture is well documented, less so is its influence on English values. Through a careful study of the literature, drama, philosophy, and material culture of the period, this book articulates how Chinese culture influenced English ideas about virtue. Discourses of virtue were significantly shaped by the intensified trade with the East Indies. Chi-ming Yang focuses on key forms of virtue—heroism, sincerity, piety, moderation, sensibility, and patriotism—whose meanings and s...
