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Reflections on Sentiment not only addresses current scholarly
interest in feeling and affect but also provides an occasion to
celebrate the career of George Starr, who, in more than fifty years
of incisive scholarship and committed teaching, haselucidated the
work of Daniel Defoe and the role of sentimentalism in what was
once reductively termed an age of reason and realism. Due to the
critique Starr spearheaded, scholars today can approach with
greater assurance the complex interplay of reason and emotion,
thought and sensibility, science and feeling, rationality and
enthusiasm, judgment and wit, as well as forethought and instinct,
as these shaped the scientific, religious, political, social,
literary, and cultural revolutions of the Enlightenment. Indeed,
contributors to this anthology take inspiration from Starr's work
to shed new light on Enlightenment thought and sociocultural
formations generally, offering fresh interpretations of a period in
which Reflection and Sentiment circulated, mutually influenced each
other, and contended equally for cultural attention. In nine
separate essays they explore: the ways sentiment and sentimentalism
inflect the moral and ideological ambit of Enlightenment
discourses; the sociopolitics of religious debate; the issues
promoted by women writers, by gender and family relations; the
artistic and rhetorical uses of lived language; the impacts of
cultural developments on novelistic form; and the wide shifts in
the literary marketplace. Deploying tools advanced by new work in
animal studies, gender criticism, media analysis, genre studies,
the new formalism, and ethical inquiry, and enabled by the power of
digitization and new databases, the authors of this volume explain
how and to what ends denizens of the Enlightenment were touched and
moved.
Throughout history, varying responses to catastrophe have revealed
much about a society's cultural and philosophical character. In
"Dreadful Visitations," leading scholars of different disciplines
examine eighteenth-century responses to natural disaster, showing
how human agency played an active role in the creation of
destructive circumstances, and how these disasters helped to
establish national and moral identities in the Age of Reason.
Contributors: David Arnold, Daniel Gordon, Carla Hesse, George
Starr, Alan Taylor, Steven Tobriner and Charles Walker.
Dreadful Visitations offers a rare historical perspective on the cultural impact of disasters, examining eighteenth-century responses to the natural catastrophes that challenged the period's claim to reason and mastery of the environment.
The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British
novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to
develop into the period's most versatile and popular literary form.
Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary,
intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing
innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender
considerations, formal characteristics, economic history,
enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights,
ecological ramifications, and Britain's growing global involvement.
Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to
individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered.
These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic
chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the
works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural
perspectives. The handbook's breadth and depth, clear presentation,
and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and
student alike.
Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer,
1750-1837 examines the processes of cultural transfer between
Britain and Germany during the Personal Union, the period from 1714
to 1837 when the kings of England were simultaneously Electors of
Hanover. While scholars have generally focused on the political and
diplomatic implications of the Personal Union, Alessa Johns offers
a new perspective by tracing sociocultural repercussions by
investigating how, in the period of the American and French
Revolutions, Britain and Germany generated distinct discourses of
liberty even though they were nonrevolutionary countries. British
and German reformists - feminists in particular - used the period's
expanded pathways of cultural transfer to generate new discourses
as well as to articulate new views of what personal freedom,
national character, and international interaction might be. Johns
traces four pivotal moments of cultural exchange: the expansion of
the book trade, the rage for translation, the effect of revolution
on intra-European travel and travel writing, and the impact of
transatlantic journeys on visions of reform. Johns reveals the way
in which what she terms "bluestocking transnationalism" spawned
discourses of liberty and attempts at sociocultural reform during
this period of enormous economic development, revolution, and war.
No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led
thinkers as far back as Plato and St. Augustine to conceive of
utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect
reality and as a useful tool with which to design improvements upon
it. The most studied utopias have been proposed by men, but during
the eighteenth century a group of reform-oriented female novelists
put forth a series of work that expressed their views of, and their
reservations about, ideal societies. In Women's Utopias of the
Eighteenth Century, Alessa Johns examines the utopian communities
envisaged by Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hamilton, Sarah
Scott, and other writers from Britain and continental Europe,
uncovering the ways in which they resembled--and departed
from--traditional utopias. Johns demonstrates that while
traditional visions tended to look back to absolutist models,
women's utopias quickly incorporated emerging liberal ideas that
allowed far more room for personal initiative and gave agency to
groups that were not culturally dominant, such as the female
writers themselves. Women's utopias, Johns argues, were
reproductive in nature. They had the potential to reimagine and
perpetuate themselves.
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