HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

This book explores the networks of printers and booksellers that covered eighteenth-century France, situating these key cultural intermediaries within their political and socio-economic environments.

Volume 5 covers reading and publishing from 1695 through 1830. Includes material about the broader cultural and economic contexts as well as details about different genres and particular reading audiences.

This group of essays by the French cultural historian has had a big impact on scholars of printing history and reading practices.

This account of Old Regime Europe explores the cultural revolution which transformed eighteenth-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV's Versailles was pushed from the center to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space - the public sphere. The author shows how many of the world's most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library, the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic. It was here that public opinion staked its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of culture and politics.

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

The author demonstrates that narratives of seduction function as a master plot for French literature in the 18th century and argues that this trope was a reaction to a dominant cultural discourse that coded the novel and the new practice of solitary reading as dangerous, seductive practices. The study is situated within the context of paintings, educational manuals, and criticism that cautioned against the act of reading.

The Spectator: Emerging Discourses brings together a distinguished group of international scholars who take a fresh look at this influential eighteenth-century English periodical. Taking advantage of the insights provided by new historicism, postcolonialism, psychology, postmodernism and cultural studies, and by such theorists as Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas, the scholars offer new insights into The Spectator's relation to the changing society that influenced it-and that it in turn influenced.

Farge begins with Habermas's notion of a bourgeois public sphere. However, whereas Habermas was concerned mostly with the 'cultured classes,' Farge focuses on the uneducated common people. Drawing on chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police reports, and news sheets from the time, she finds that by the second half of the eighteenth century ordinary Parisians had come to assert their right to hold and declare clear opinions on what was happening in their city--visible, real, everyday events such as executions, price rises, and revolts.

This collection of essays displays a number of different approaches to the most significant early eighteenth-century periodicals. The range is considerable: the critique of ideology and polemical strategy, the political history of the press, the rhetoric of the genre, and the material circumstances of periodical production all find a place. The periodical profoundly shaped the English reading public's ways of perceiving the social and political institutions of their own age.

This title examines the emergence and dramatic growth of 18th century English periodical literature, showing how the journals solicited women as subscribers and contributors, while also attempting to regulate their conduct through the promotion of exemplary feminine types. By enclosing its female readership within a discourse that defined women in terms of love, matrimony, the family, and the home, the English periodical became one of the main linguistic sites for the construction of the 18th century ideology of domestic womanhood.

Explores the transatlantic literary imagination during the key period from 1660 to 1830: from the colonization of the Americas to the formative decades following political separation between the United Kingdom and the United States. Revealing how literary genres were borrowed and readapted to a different context, the volume offers an index of the larger literary influences going backwards and forwards across the ocean.

This edited collection explores themes such as the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women's lives. The book will appeal to those interested in women's writing and women's relationships in the eighteenth century--and today--and in feminist literary history.