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doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.003pmid: N/A
During the second half of the 18th-century Belgian historiography developed from the discipline of ‘writing’ history and collecting historical information towards the discipline of ‘studying’ history. The ‘old’ historian wrote a ‘history’ in which (by definition) as many data as possible concerning (the past of) a subject (a province, a city, a diocese, an institution) were gathered. The ‘new’ historian on the other hand wrote a ‘dissertation’, the topic of which was not so much the past of a certain entity (geographical or historical), but rather a historical and/or historiographical issue. This transformation of historiography concerned a lot of different aspects of this particular intellectual activity, including the position of the reader, who now was supposed to be interested in historical research as such. These shifts coincide and are partly determined by the ‘invention’ of a Belgian national history (the general history of the Austrian Netherlands), which gradually replaced the particular historiography of the old principalities (such as the country of Flanders and the duchy of Brabant). Henceforth Belgian historians did not have to write a multitude of histories anymore, they now all worked on one larger project, on just one history. Therefore their work consisted of mere contributions, they solved problems and allowed the Belgian history to be written, somewhere in the future.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.004pmid: N/A
The publication of George Psalmanazar's Description of Formosa (1704–1705) and the controversy surrounding the young man who claimed to be ‘a Native of Formosa, An Island subject to the Emperor of Japan,’ must place text and author among the most audacious examples of literary fraud in any language. Psalmanazar's Formosa fabrications—including claims of endemic polygamy, cannibalism, and child sacrifice—titillated and appalled his contemporaries, including Jonathan Swift, who paid mock tribute to the ‘famous Salmanaazor’ in A Modest Proposal (1729), crediting the ‘Formosan’ with being the true genius behind the plan ‘for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country’. Little attention has been paid to the possibility that Psalmanazar may have been a source for other Swift satires, including the little-known An Account of the Court and Empire of Japan (1727–1728), and major texts such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This essay aims to bring the image of one of the 18th century's more entertaining personalities into sharper resolution, and to explore the possibility that his influence on Swift was greater than has been generally suspected.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.005pmid: N/A
From its ornamental and often bookish exterior to its use as an exegetical tool for understanding the Book of Nature, the 18th-century microscope was socialized as an instrument of letters as well as of science. This essay proposes a reading of the microscope as a literary artifact by examining its bindings, its texts and its illustrations. While the instrument promised to extend human sense perception and to give its user access to invisible worlds, it simultaneously threatened to alter received views concerning both aesthetics and social hierarchy. Nevertheless, the destabilizing effects of the microscopic message entered polite society cloaked in a veil of familiarity in the binding of a good book. The nostalgia-encrusted instrument absorbed the shock of the new.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.006pmid: N/A
This article examines the use of dialogues in two texts which functioned superficially as scientific handbooks for women: Aphra Behn's translation of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretien sur la pluralité des Mondes and Elizabeth Carter's Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explained for the Use of Ladies (1739) translated from Francesco Algarotti's Il Newtoniasnismo Per le Dame (1737). Original texts exploit the female figure for the scientific cause, but at first glance, both of the original texts appeared generous to the ‘fair sex’. However, neither text is as sympathetic as it initially appears. The confused gender messages emitted by these texts are further complicated by the fact that they were translated by women.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.007pmid: N/A
Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind. I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.009pmid: N/A
This article explores the critical history and reception of Charles Churchill, the mid-eighteenth century satirist, looking in particular at his skepticism towards all authority as a questioning of traditional ideas of `enlightenment', and at the reasons for the meteoric but short-lived nature of his poetic success.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.010pmid: N/A
Often William Blake and Isaac Newton are positioned as “opposites”: Newton the great systematizer, Blake the visionary artist. (Blake himself, in fact, seemed to have set up this direct opposition.) However, this opposition is perhaps too simple and overlooks the intricacies of each thinker's work. Further, this straightforward “opposition” fails to account for the pressure that scholarship itself, always occurring from a particular subjective position, applies to shape its objects of study; that is, it creates a useful “Newton” and a useful “Blake” with which to work. Here I employ spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre's technique of “critical thirding” (as Edward Soja has called it), or accounting for “an-Other” position in the dialectic of “Blake” and “Newton”. I consider where Blake and Newton were perhaps more similar than has been suggested in the scholarly literature, and, more crucially, how scholarship itself mobilizes (or indeed “creates”) its own, subjectively useful, “Blake” and “Newton” in order to make particular arguments.
doi: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.012pmid: N/A
In many ways, the 1707 Act of Union encouraged various practices of literary nation-building and the search for authentic ’British’ voices. In their desire to assert the politeness of this newly constituted British identity, writers such as Joseph Addison, Thomas Blackwell and James Macpherson shared a preoccupation with a quality which Addison termed ‘majestick Simplicity’. The implicit codification of polite manners and taste in the Spectator might at first appear to contradict this literary fascination with the search for exemplars of native British simplicity. This article explores the continuity of these concerns in the writings of Addison, Blackwell and Macpherson, suggesting some of the ways that authenticity and politeness exerted conflicting demands on the eighteenth-century literary culture of Britishness.
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