Browsing by Subject "Eighteenth century"
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Item Blind items : anonymity, notoriety, and the making of eighteenth-century celebrity(2012-08) Bourque, Kevin Jordan; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Barchas, Janine; Bertelsen, Lance; Brewer, David; Hedrick, ElizabethBlind Items examines the multimedia production of celebrity through the eighteenth century, especially the way in which the same texts, images, anecdotes and poses were recycled and updated to evoke a series of public notables. In the multimedia explosion accompanying the Enlightenment, cultural productions typically read as static and self-contained – from mezzotint prints, shilling pamphlets and novels to popular songs, fashions, jokes and gestures – were instead constantly repurposed to suit successions of public figures, each passing luminary determined by the present cultural moment. Surveying three arenas in which eighteenth-century celebrity was manufactured – fashion, sex, and sport – my archive demonstrates that even canonical authors and artists of the period built their careers on the passing celebrity of others, and indeed maintained the relevance of their productions by perpetually remaking and updating their celebrity referents. Blind Items contests critical assumptions regarding the singularity of celebrity, instead focusing on interchangeability, commutability and disposability. In so doing, the project troubles ongoing assumptions regarding the rise of the individual, as it explains why modern-day celebrity still retains aspects of the Enlightenment mold that first gave it shape.Item Building opportunity : disaster response and recovery after the 1773 earthquake in Antigua Guatemala(2013-08) Pajon, Mauricio A.; Deans-Smith, Susan, 1953-Building Opportunity centers on disaster response and recovery after a 7.5-magnitude earthquake destroyed the city of Antigua Guatemala, the capital of colonial Guatemala, on July 29, 1773. It also concentrates on the colonial government’s decision to relocate Antigua Guatemala and establish a new capital, New Guatemala. This dissertation examines how the cultural, economic, political, and social views of inhabitants -- bureaucrats, clerics, Indians, architects, and the poor -- shaped their reactions to the tremor. Furthermore, it contends that the migration from Antigua Guatemala to New Guatemala created socioeconomic opportunities through which individuals made strong efforts to rebuild their lives. Debates on natural catastrophe in colonial Latin America have emphasized the ability of calamity to ignite power struggles over competing ideas about emergency management. However, in addition to an analysis of such disputes, this dissertation advances new understandings of the ways in which the earthquake gave victims chances to reshape their world. How did individuals' beliefs influence their attitudes toward the cataclysm? How did the effort to create a new city forge openings for survivors to refashion their identities? This study shows that individual groups' notions of fear, hazard mitigation, history, and socioeconomics defined arguments about whether or not to move. It also demonstrates that the tragedy produced spaces in which officials, ecclesiastics, indigenous peoples, and the impoverished worked to improve their lives. In various ways, administrators and victims turned adversity into an opportunity to become disaster managers and survivors, respectively.Item Imagined Intimacies : women's writing, community, and affiliation in eighteenth-century North America(2010-05) Wigginton, Caroline Hopkins; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Scheick, William J.; Brooks, Joanna M.; Cox, James H.; Eastman, Carolyn; Wilks, Jennifer M.My dissertation argues for a fundamental reorientation of our approach to public intimacy and identifies a lushly pragmatic rhetorical schema via which black, white, and Native women enter colonial American public life. I contend that these early American women employ the language of personal intimacy -- familial, spiritual, domestic -- to craft wide-ranging public interventions. Through references to their private affiliations, they associate themselves with others who share their religious, economic, political, and social concerns and thereby forge semi-public communities. I demonstrate that because such language retains women's often un-egalitarian and un-affective experiences of quotidian intimacy and therefore appears "natural" for women, it masks the radicalism, formal and substantive, of their interventions. Thus, in making public issues intimate, these women discreetly authorize and advance their interests. They use the same techniques whether they are preaching religious principles, positing alternative political models, or promoting preferred agricultural commodities. I rely upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, including studies of anthropology, religion, and economic, political, and regional history, to produce dense local studies. Yet, since I interrogate an array of authors and genres -- published and manuscript poetry, diplomatic and legal documents, commonplace books, spiritual diaries, autobiographies, and letters -- my project synthesizes those studies into a history that is multi-denominational, multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-regional.Item Mechanical operations of the spirit : the Protestant object in Swift and Defoe(2010-12) Neimann, Paul Grafton; Betelsen, Lance; Arens, Katherine, 1953-; Rumrich, John; Bender, John; Hedrick, ElizabethThis study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague.Item Some versions of the fragment, 1700-1800(2014-08) Schneider, Rachel Marie; Bertelsen, Lance; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Moore, Lisa L; Baker, Samuel; Pagani, KarenSome Versions of the Fragment, 1700-1800 examines the eighteenth-century literary print fragment archive to redefine the fragment as a genre typified by its materiality. Eighteenth-century fragments included not just sentimental poems, but novels, satires, and political pamphlets. They are both long and short; written by famous and anonymous authors; canonical and unknown. This dissertation, in recuperating the eighteenth-century fragment’s rich variety, offers a taxonomy that includes three versions of the fragment: the unintentional, the intentional, and the complete. Examining the fragment in this way not only provides categories that can help us better understand how fragments fit within various social and cultural conditions in the eighteenth century, but also how these ways of understanding the fragment can help critics account for its evolutions today. Previous analyses of the literary fragment have emphasized its metaphorical qualities and its formal dimensions. This dissertation argues that the genre is defined no less by its materiality: prefaces, punctuation, and page arrangements are the common constitutive elements shared by all three versions of the fragment. By paying attention to the eighteenth-century fragment’s materiality, critics today can better account for the fragment’s role in the period’s generic developments, as well as its evolving literary marketplace.Item Undressing nature: the uncertain enlightenment and the hermeneutic ontology of the novel(2015-12) Cowles, Lynn Aysley; Garrison, James D.; Rumrich, John; Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Ingrassia, Catherine_Undressing Nature_ argues that in some of the writing produced by pioneers working in new literary generic forms at the end of the Early Modern period, the characteristics of irony, self-reflexive discourse, and the consistent examination of the fictional in relation to the real function narratively and culturally to undermine the empiricist project of totalizing knowledge that prescribed the field of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment. These characteristics, which came to be identified with the genre of the novel in subsequent centuries, refuse the determination of perfect or exact meaning within systems of signification, and they excavate the Enlightenment subject from Cartesian epistemological interiority. As they contemplated divisions between the external material world and the inner thinking mind, some Early Modern figures relied on the rhetorical tradition of figuring words or expression as the dress or clothing that brings forth human thought or nature into the world of interaction and communication. Because of the philosophical position of language or dress in between the universal and the particular, these metaphors provide fascinating examples of the philosophical nexus between literature, culture, and philosophy. By approaching the task of interpreting both words and the world with skepticism, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding scrutinized the ideological infrastructures of Enlightenment thought and reformulated contemporary understandings of knowing and being. Their ironic discourse interrogated the concept of the stable self, and in the process of doing so, these authors tested out, examined, and developed a discursive structure for meaning and interpretation that relied on the subject’s position in a networked system of identification. In such a system, being and identity are contingent upon the subject’s relationship not only with other subjects but also with material objects in the world like books and clothes. The externalizing of subjectivity removes the self from the Cartesian binary of mind and body and implicates the subject in relation to others such that identity and meaning are understood in an hermeneutic network of ontological signification. Undressing Nature argues that the discursive structure of the novel provides a venue in which theorizers of uncertainty and indeterminacy during the Enlightenment produced narratives that exhibit and reconstruct that hermeneutic ontology.Item Working women, debt, and reputation in early modern Lyon(2009-12) Somers, Susan Claire; Hardwick, Julie, 1962-This paper analyzes the financial and professional circumstances of two single working women in early-to-mid eighteenth-century Lyon. Using the documents deposited in court for their debt investigations, the author examines the matrix of credit, reputation, and gender to understand the challenges facing working women in an increasingly professionalized world, as well as the ways women sought to appropriately represent themselves in court. Several key challenges working women faced are highlighted; women who did not successfully negotiate these challenges might find themselves in court for debt litigation. These challenges included collecting debts (in specie), activating community and regional patronage networks, exercising control over property, and claiming gendered authority against the threat of male-controlled guilds. In response, both women constructed narratives of charitable activity to refute their charges; the documents submitted to the court evince both women's charitable activity in Lyon. By casting themselves as philanthropists they engaged gender and class categories to create an appropriately feminine reputation that would still allow for transacting money and labor.