The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

Author: Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995-03-24

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0198024274

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A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.


Book Synopsis The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny by : Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University

Download or read book The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny written by Terry Castle Professor of English Stanford University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995-03-24 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the author's essays on the history and development of female identity from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle's work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression and sexual ambiguity.


The Uncanny

The Uncanny

Author: Nicholas Royle

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9780719055614

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This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The uncanny," where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, déjà-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness," the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film, and religion. This is a major critical study that will be welcomed by students and academics but will also be of interest to the general reader.


Book Synopsis The Uncanny by : Nicholas Royle

Download or read book The Uncanny written by Nicholas Royle and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The uncanny," where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, déjà-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness," the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film, and religion. This is a major critical study that will be welcomed by students and academics but will also be of interest to the general reader.


The Victorian Eighteenth Century

The Victorian Eighteenth Century

Author: B.W. Young

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-10-18

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0199256225

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Exploring the Victorian fascination with the generation of their grandparents and great-grandparents, Brian Young illuminates Victorian intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Examining the work of men such as Thomas Carlyle, the book reveals how the Victorians were haunted by the eighteenth century, both metaphorically and literally.


Book Synopsis The Victorian Eighteenth Century by : B.W. Young

Download or read book The Victorian Eighteenth Century written by B.W. Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the Victorian fascination with the generation of their grandparents and great-grandparents, Brian Young illuminates Victorian intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Examining the work of men such as Thomas Carlyle, the book reveals how the Victorians were haunted by the eighteenth century, both metaphorically and literally.


Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century

Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century

Author: Mirella Agorni

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-08

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1317640632

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Translating Italy in the Eighteenth Century offers a historical analysis of the role played by translation in that complex redefinition of women's writing that was taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigates the ways in which women writers managed to appropriate images of Italy and adapt them to their own purposes in a period which covers the 'moral turn' in women's writing in the 1740s and foreshadows the Romantic interest in Italy at the end of the century. A brief survey of translations produced by women in the period 1730-1799 provides an overview of the genres favoured by women translators, such as the moral novel, sentimental play and a type of conduct literature of a distinctively 'proto-feminist' character. Elizabeth Carter's translation of Francesco Algarotti's II Newtonianesimo per le Dame (1739) is one of the best examples of the latter kind of texts. A close reading of the English translation indicates a 'proto-feminist' exploitation of the myth of Italian women's cultural prestige. Another genre increasingly accessible to women, namely travel writing, confirms this female interest in Italy. Female travellers who visited Italy in the second half of the century, such as Hester Piozzi, observed the state of women's education through the lenses provided by Carter. Piozzi's image of Italy, a paradoxical mixture of imagination and realistic observation, became a powerful symbolic source, which enabled the fictional image of a modern, relatively egalitarian British society to take shape.


Book Synopsis Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century by : Mirella Agorni

Download or read book Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century written by Mirella Agorni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating Italy in the Eighteenth Century offers a historical analysis of the role played by translation in that complex redefinition of women's writing that was taking place in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigates the ways in which women writers managed to appropriate images of Italy and adapt them to their own purposes in a period which covers the 'moral turn' in women's writing in the 1740s and foreshadows the Romantic interest in Italy at the end of the century. A brief survey of translations produced by women in the period 1730-1799 provides an overview of the genres favoured by women translators, such as the moral novel, sentimental play and a type of conduct literature of a distinctively 'proto-feminist' character. Elizabeth Carter's translation of Francesco Algarotti's II Newtonianesimo per le Dame (1739) is one of the best examples of the latter kind of texts. A close reading of the English translation indicates a 'proto-feminist' exploitation of the myth of Italian women's cultural prestige. Another genre increasingly accessible to women, namely travel writing, confirms this female interest in Italy. Female travellers who visited Italy in the second half of the century, such as Hester Piozzi, observed the state of women's education through the lenses provided by Carter. Piozzi's image of Italy, a paradoxical mixture of imagination and realistic observation, became a powerful symbolic source, which enabled the fictional image of a modern, relatively egalitarian British society to take shape.


Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Author: Jolene Zigarovich

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1512823783

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Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses--such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons--the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself--its parts, or its preserved representation--functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich's analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.


Book Synopsis Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel by : Jolene Zigarovich

Download or read book Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel written by Jolene Zigarovich and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period's rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses--such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons--the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself--its parts, or its preserved representation--functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich's analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.


The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century

Author: H. B. Nisbet

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-12-08

Total Pages: 978

ISBN-13: 9780521317207

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This is a comprehensive 1997 account of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey of critical writing, but a multidisciplinary investigation of how the understanding of literature and its various genres was transformed, at the start of the modern era, by developments in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as in society at large. In the process, modern literary theory - at first often implicit in literary texts themselves - emancipated itself from classical poetics and rhetoric, and literary criticism emerged as a full-time professional activity catering for an expanding literate public. The volume is international both in coverage and in authorship. Extensive bibliographies provide guidance for further specialised study.


Book Synopsis The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century by : H. B. Nisbet

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century written by H. B. Nisbet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-08 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive 1997 account of the history of literary criticism in Britain and Europe between 1660 and 1800. Unlike previous histories, it is not just a chronological survey of critical writing, but a multidisciplinary investigation of how the understanding of literature and its various genres was transformed, at the start of the modern era, by developments in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, linguistics, and other disciplines, as well as in society at large. In the process, modern literary theory - at first often implicit in literary texts themselves - emancipated itself from classical poetics and rhetoric, and literary criticism emerged as a full-time professional activity catering for an expanding literate public. The volume is international both in coverage and in authorship. Extensive bibliographies provide guidance for further specialised study.


The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century

Author: George Alexander Kennedy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 978

ISBN-13: 9780521300094

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This comprehensive 1997 account of eighteenth-century literary criticism is now available in paperback.


Book Synopsis The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century by : George Alexander Kennedy

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century written by George Alexander Kennedy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive 1997 account of eighteenth-century literary criticism is now available in paperback.


Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Author: Jolene Zigarovich

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1136182365

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This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.


Book Synopsis Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature by : Jolene Zigarovich

Download or read book Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature written by Jolene Zigarovich and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century’s shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.


Monstrous Motherhood

Monstrous Motherhood

Author: Marilyn Francus

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1421407981

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Spectral and monstrous mothers populate the cultural and literary landscape of the eighteenth century, overturning scholarly assumptions about this being an era of ideal motherhood. Although credited with the rise of domesticity, eighteenth-century British culture singularly lacked narratives of good mothers, ostensibly the most domestic of females. With startling frequency, the best mother was absent, disembodied, voiceless, or dead. British culture told tales almost exclusively of wicked, surrogate, or spectral mothers—revealing the defects of domestic ideology, the cultural fascination with standards and deviance, and the desire to police maternal behaviors. Monstrous Motherhood analyzes eighteenth-century motherhood in light of the inconsistencies among domestic ideology, narrative, and historical practice. If domesticity was so important, why is the good mother’s story absent or peripheral? What do the available maternal narratives suggest about domestic ideology and the expectations and enactment of motherhood? By focusing on literary and historical mothers in novels, plays, poems, diaries, conduct manuals, contemporary court cases, realist fiction, fairy tales, satire, and romance, Marilyn Francus reclaims silenced maternal voices and perspectives. She exposes the mechanisms of maternal marginalization and spectralization in eighteenth-century culture and revises the domesticity thesis. Monstrous Motherhood will compel scholars in eighteenth-century studies, women’s studies, family history, and cultural studies to reevaluate a foundational assumption that has driven much of the discourse in their fields.


Book Synopsis Monstrous Motherhood by : Marilyn Francus

Download or read book Monstrous Motherhood written by Marilyn Francus and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectral and monstrous mothers populate the cultural and literary landscape of the eighteenth century, overturning scholarly assumptions about this being an era of ideal motherhood. Although credited with the rise of domesticity, eighteenth-century British culture singularly lacked narratives of good mothers, ostensibly the most domestic of females. With startling frequency, the best mother was absent, disembodied, voiceless, or dead. British culture told tales almost exclusively of wicked, surrogate, or spectral mothers—revealing the defects of domestic ideology, the cultural fascination with standards and deviance, and the desire to police maternal behaviors. Monstrous Motherhood analyzes eighteenth-century motherhood in light of the inconsistencies among domestic ideology, narrative, and historical practice. If domesticity was so important, why is the good mother’s story absent or peripheral? What do the available maternal narratives suggest about domestic ideology and the expectations and enactment of motherhood? By focusing on literary and historical mothers in novels, plays, poems, diaries, conduct manuals, contemporary court cases, realist fiction, fairy tales, satire, and romance, Marilyn Francus reclaims silenced maternal voices and perspectives. She exposes the mechanisms of maternal marginalization and spectralization in eighteenth-century culture and revises the domesticity thesis. Monstrous Motherhood will compel scholars in eighteenth-century studies, women’s studies, family history, and cultural studies to reevaluate a foundational assumption that has driven much of the discourse in their fields.


The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Author: S. Bowen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-08-30

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0230111874

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This book argues that representations of popular culture in the eighteenth-century novel served as repositories of traditional social values and played a role in Britain's transition to an imperial state.


Book Synopsis The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction by : S. Bowen

Download or read book The Politics of Custom in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction written by S. Bowen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-08-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that representations of popular culture in the eighteenth-century novel served as repositories of traditional social values and played a role in Britain's transition to an imperial state.