Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture
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Most cited papers in Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture
This chapter offers an overview of the relationship between Gothic and Classical literature and aesthetics in Britain in the long eighteenth century. British writers increasingly felt haunted by the ghosts of the Classical past, and... more
The continuing debates amongst early modern historians about the supposed rise of a public sphere have invigorated the history of the British coffeehouse. This article interrogates one central aspect of many histories of the coffeehouse –... more
Modern Western temporality is often characterized (quoting Walter Benjamin) as " homogeneous, empty time. " This temporality is said (in the influential works of Johannes Fabian and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example) to result from a... more
By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin Circle, this paper explores the extent to which the public sphere can open up possibilities for resistance to dominant social relations through ‘traces of meaning’. The author wishes to show how... more
John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa, was one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment. Though scholars embrace its impact on the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and... more
This article considers the social function of contagious disease as moderator of class relationships in England during the first half of the eighteenth century and takes into account the ways in which the 'communicability' of the plague,... more
An Easy Introduction to the English Language (1745) is the grammar in the Circle of the Sciences series, a children’s encyclopaedia published by John Newbery. The volumes in the Circle series were established reading material for boys and... more
As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new... more
The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose vast holdings... more
Prize-nominated History of Performances, Adaptations, Translations and the wider cultural influence of ancient Greek tragedy in the British theatre between the Restoration and World War !. Richly illustrated
This article explores the early modern historiography of the public sphere concept with special reference to the role of sex and gender in the coffeehouses of post-Restoration England. It examines the way in which normative concepts of... more
Argues that the literary art of Hogarth stands in sharp opposition to continental pictura-poesis theory and practice, especially as represented by the De Arte Graphica of Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy (1668), and by the academic programme... more
How would the history of computer-generated virtual worlds look different if we located their forerunners not in the realistic fictional worlds of earlier art or media forms such as the novel or cinema, but in skeptical modes of... more
This essay examines new developments in the history of eighteenth-century British art since the publication of David Solkin's Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England in 1993. While Solkin's... more
The paper reconstructs the life and activity of the author of a famous novel for boys as well as a textbook of arithmetic and of essays on educational issues, who was also the sister of a famous economist. The bulk of the paper is... more
Jean Gagnier’s De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis (1723) was the first substantial biography of the Prophet Muhammad translated by a European author directly from an authentic Muslim source. Familiar to Edward Gibbon and Voltaire,... more
In 1807 Lachlan Macquarie travelled to Britain from India via the Middle East and Russia. He was particularly impressed with the city of St Petersburg. Scholars have paid little attention to this journey, but this article argues that... more
Focusing on the ballad “Sandman Joe” from Francis Place’s collection of flash ballads remembered from his youth, this article tracks how and where bawdy ballads were performed in London in the 1780s in order to understand better the... more
This essay explores Henry Fielding's development of the marriage plot in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Surveying theatrical echoes in these works, which are particularly apparent in their marriage plots, I make the case that... more
During the eighteenth century modern European languages obtained a new wealth of literary, scientific and philosophical idiom through translation. Translations from Latin into French, Italian, Spanish, English and German, and to a lesser... more
This article addresses the overlooked significance of urban life to first-wave Gothic fiction and the work of Ann Radcliffe in particular. Despite its various remote settings, Radcliffe’s exemplary Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho,... more
The overarching goal of this article is to present a methodology for attributing publications with false and misleading imprints to their unnamed printers. The answer to this problem—how to link publications featuring inaccurate imprints... more
There is a fine timber moulded cornice in a front room of the building that was once the House of Industry at Gressenhall, Norfolk, while along the eastern wing of the building one can still see the architectural features of an elegant... more
Historians have typically viewed the construction of naval hospitals in the mid-eighteenth century as, variously, the British imperial state’s response to a broken system of contract care, a training ground for medical officers, a... more
The upsurge of press titles in eighteenth-century Britain provided unprecedented public arenas to discuss socio-political issues within a global context. Imperial sovereignty became an item of debate infusing as much the commentaries on... more
The dramatic landscape of the Scottish Highlands is punctuated by the well-ordered presence of over 300 white, twostoreyed ‘neat and regular’ farmhouses that were built through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These... more
Glen McGillivray traces the eighteenth-century construction of the picturesque landscape and its dependence on theatrical staging to produce aesthetic effect. The ‘framing of the world’ produced within this quintessential manipulation of... more
During the eighteenth century, the stomachs of the British upper ranks threatened to turn on their owners and devour them from the inside. These fears of gastric rebellion in the polite interior were articulated in a series of medical... more
Critical edition of Mandeville's only book on medical science. Concentrating on digestion, hypochondria and hysteria, Mandeville exposes his conception of the patient-physician relation in what could be described as a form of talking cure.
It is well known that Newtonian philosophers such as Johan T. Desaguliers defined their authority in contradistinction to the 'projector', a promoter of allegedly impractical and fraudulent schemes. Partly due to the lack of evidence,... more