HIST 358: The Self before the Selfie (HC): Elite and Popular Publics

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a new understanding of the relationship between performance and self. Across religious diatribes and sentimental comedies, technical manuals and epistolary novels, Leichman traces the development of early modern acting theories that define the aesthetics, philosophy, and politics of the performed subject.

Aristocratic Vice examines the outrage against--and attempts to end--the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. Each of the four, it was commonly believed, owed its origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish those perpetrators who were members of the elite. In this exciting new book, Andrew explores each vice's treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of "class superiority" among the soon-to-emerge British middle class. "Donna Andrew continues to illuminate the mental landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. . . . No historian of the period has made greater or more effective use of the newspaper press as a source for cultural history than she. This book is evidently the product of a great deal of work and is likely to stimulate further work."--Joanna Innes, University of Oxford

Caricatured for extravagance, vanity, glamorous celebrity and, all too often, embroiled in scandal and gossip, 18th-century London's fashionable society had a well-deserved reputation for frivolity. But to be fashionable in 1700s London meant more than simply being well dressed. Fashion denoted membership of a new type of society - the beau monde, a world where status was no longer determined by coronets and country seats alone but by the more nebulous qualification of metropolitan 'fashion'. Conspicuous consumption and display were crucial: the right address, the right dinner guests, the right possessions, the right jewels, the right seat at the opera. The Beau Monde leads us on a tour of this exciting new world, from court and parliament to London's parks, pleasure grounds, and private homes. Above all, as the story unfolds, we learn that being a Fashionable was about far more than simply being 'modish'. By the end of the century, it had become nothing less than the key to power and exclusivity in a changed world.
A digital copy of the book is also available.

This critical anthology examines the place of the sublime in the cultural history of the late eighteenth century and Romantic period. Cultures of the Sublime recovers a broad context for engagements with, and writing about, the sublime, offering a selection of texts from a wide range of areas which both generate and investigate sublime effects.

Explores the important archive of the daily box office receipts for Paris’s Comédie-Française theater troupe from 1680 to 1793 to examine programming decisions made by the royal troupe in Paris during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The essays in this volume explore the troupe’s full repertory during this period, which consisted of more than 1,000 plays written by more than 300 playwrights, for more than 33,000 nightly performances. Go to the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP) website to access primary sources.

Enlightened Metropolis examines the tsarist regime's efforts to turn Moscow into a European city. In the eighteenth century, Europeans and even some Russians scorned Moscow as part of Asia, and the tsars themselves thought it a benighted place that endangered both their political security and their effort to Westernize their country and gain respect for Russia abroad. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to remake Moscow on the model of St. Petersburg by reconstructing its buildings and institutions, fostering a Westernized "middle estate" and constructing a new image of Moscow as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the city's urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I?How did these changes affect the everyday lives of the inhabitants, and did a "middle estate" in fact come into being? Did Moscow's urban modernization resemble that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon in 1812? Lastly, how was Moscow's modernizationinterpreted by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

This book takes its readers through the streets and fairs of eighteenth-century Paris--from cafes to boulevard theaters, and even to freak shows--on a lively investigation of various forms of entertainment, the people who enjoyed them, and the reasons for their popularity. Entertainment in eighteenth-century Paris was far more than mere diversion, argues Isherwood. It was a vital way for people to explore their fantasies. Using an imaginative array of sources,Farce and Fantasydescribes the public's subliminal search for sex, pathos, brutality, and absurdity through certain types of entertainment, and shows how the lower classes often used entertainment to poke fun at the elite.

This study looks back to Grétry's earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry's work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.

Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from across the arts like Voltaire, Garrick, and Liszt were all veritable celebrities in their time, arousing curiosity and passionate loyalty from their "fans." The rise of the press, new advertising techniques, and the marketing of leisure brought a profound transformation in the visibility of celebrities: private lives were now very much on public show.

"Long before the Internet and advent of “social media,” even before the invention of photography…prints played a key role in the creation of modern political culture: prints helped people grasp the essence and significance of newsworthy events both near and far.” With 40 catalogue entries and 43 illustrations documenting prints and rare books made in France from 1770 to 1820, this scholarly publication offers new insights on art and ideas in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty essays both introduce students and scholars to the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theatre and also push the boundaries of the field. The Handbook gives equal attention to the range of dramatic forms - not just tragedy and comedy, but the likes of melodrama and pantomime - as they developed and overlapped across the period, and to the occasions, communities, and materialities of theatre production. It includes sections on historiography, the censorship and regulation of drama, theatre and the Romantic canon, women and the stage, and the performance of race and empire. In doing so, the Handbook shows the centrality of theatre to Georgian culture and politics, and paints a picture of a stage defined by generic fluidity and experimentation; by networks of performance that spread far beyond London; by professional women who played pivotal roles in every aspect of production; and by its complex mediation of contemporary attitudes of class, race, and gender.

In his collective portrait of the common people, Roche offers a rich and fascinating description of their lives--their housing, food, dress, financial dealings, literature, domestic life, and leisure time. Roche's highly readable style and use of contemporary quotations enliven the reader's view of eighteenth-century Paris and Parisians.

John Brewer's landmark book shows us how English artists, amateurs, entrepreneurs, and audiences developed a culture that is still celebrated for its wit and brilliance. Brewer's purpose is to show how literature, painting, music, and the theater related to a public increasingly avid for them; how artists used, or were used by, publishers, plagiarists, impresarios, and managers; and how contemporary ideas of taste combined with patriotic fervor and shrewdly managed commerce to create a vibrant, dynamic national culture. In Brewer's transforming analysis, we see revealed a picture of English eighteenth-century art and literature that is less familiar but more surprising, more various, and more convincing than any we have seen before.

The eleven essays in this issue on “Publicity and Privacy in Early Modern Europe” from the journal History Compass engage with the arguments of Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005) from the perspective of the making of early modern publics. The essays emerged out of the work of an interdisciplinary collaborative research project entitled ‘Making Publics: Media, Markets and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700’ (MaPs). They demonstrate that the history of publicity and the history of privacy must be considered together, and as part of the continuing relationship of lived experience and the imagination. See the table of contents.

Why did eighteenth-century writers employ digression as a literary form of diversion, and how did their readers come to enjoy linguistic and textual devices that self-consciously disrupt the reading experience? Darryl P. Domingo answers these questions through an examination of the formative period in the commercialization of leisure in England, and the coincidental coming of age of literary self-consciousness in works published between approximately 1690 and 1760. Such devices adopt similar forms and fulfill similar functions in literature as do diversions in culture: they 'unbend the mind' and reveal the complex reciprocity between commercialized leisure and commercial literature in the age of Swift, Pope, and Fielding.

This database lists play performances, authors and musical composers in the colony later known as Haiti. Most theater bills included two plays with additional music or dance followed by fireworks or a ball.

This is the first study of French theater and war at a time of global revolutions, colonial violence, and radical social transformation. Demonstrating how war and soldiering catalyzed new drama types and fostered theater's expansion into France's geographical and social peripheries, the study also shows how theater emerged as a dynamic space in which military practices could be re-imagined. Print copy available.

From 'folk devils' to ballroom dancers, Waltzing Through Europe explores the changing reception of fashionable couple dances in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. A refreshing intervention in dance studies, this book brings together elements of historiography, cultural memory, folklore, and dance across comparatively narrow but markedly heterogeneous localities. Rooted in investigations of often newly discovered primary sources, the essays afford many opportunities to compare sociocultural and political reactions to the arrival and practice of popular rotating couple dances, such as the Waltz and the Polka. Leading contributors provide a transnational and affective lens onto strikingly diverse topics, ranging from the evolution of romantic couple dances in Croatia, and Strauss's visits to Hamburg and Altona in the 1830s, to dance as a tool of cultural preservation and expression in twentieth-century Finland. Waltzing Through Europe creates openings for fresh collaborations in dance historiography and cultural history across fields and genres. It is essential reading for researchers of dance in central and northern Europe, while also appealing to the general reader who wants to learn more about the vibrant histories of these familiar dance forms.