Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Jacob Sider Jost
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 9780813945057

"This book shows how the multiple meanings of "interest" allowed writers in the eighteenth century to make connections among different spheres of life such as finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics"--

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Jacob Sider Jost
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813945062

Can a single word explain the world? In the British eighteenth century, interest comes close: it lies at the foundation of the period’s thinking about finance, economics, politics, psychology, and aesthetics. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century provides the first comprehensive account of interest in an era when a growing national debt created a new class of rentiers who lived off of interest, the emerging discipline of economics made self-interest an axiom of human behavior, and booksellers began for the first time to market books by calling them "interesting." Sider Jost reveals how the multiple meanings of interest allowed writers to make connections—from witty puns to deep structural analogies—among different spheres of eighteenth-century life. Challenging a long and influential tradition that reads the eighteenth century in terms of individualism, atomization, abstraction, and the hegemony of market-based thinking, this innovative study emphasizes the importance of interest as an idiom for thinking about concrete social ties, at court and in families, universities, theaters, boroughs, churches, and beyond. To "be in the interest of" or "have an interest with" another was a crucial relationship, one that supplied metaphors and habits of thought across the culture. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century recovers the small, densely networked world of Hanoverian Britain and its self-consciously inventive language for talking about human connection.

Of Consuming Interests

Of Consuming Interests
Author: Cary Carson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 721
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813914138

British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century

British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Kathleen Hardesty Doig
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2009-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443810150

France and Great Britain, so close geographically but separated by language, culture and history, had been exchanging merchandise, visitors, rulers and ideas for hundreds of years before the eighteenth century. The flow of traffic only quickened during this period, and became a flood, in the direction of Great Britain, during the decade following the Revolution. While certain of these exchanges, such as Voltaire’s sojourn abroad, have been studied in detail, others are coming into focus only as scholars study secondary figures in the host country and the interactions of various groups with its citizens. British-French Exchanges in the Eighteenth Century gathers together fourteen recent essays by scholars from Great Britain and the United States who have examined various parameters of the subject. Correspondences and translations are obvious forms of cultural sharing and are in play in many of the essays. Others recount and analyse the stories of persons who actually visited the other country in circumstances ranging from pure tourism to emigration to a hostage exchange. A final group of essays treats intellectual influences in realms as diverse as encyclopaedism, cultural analysis, connoisseurship, and cosmopolitanism in the arts. The volume is appropriate for collections in history, literature, and culture. TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I: Translations and Correspondence 1 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s English Correspondents During the French Revolution MALCOLM COOK 2 The English Translations of Voltaire’s La Pucelle J. PATRICK LEE† 3 Enlightened Exchange: The Correspondence of André Morellet and Lord Shelburne DOROTHY MEDLIN and ARLENE P. SHY 4 The Scottish Enlightenment in Action: The Correspondence of William Robertson and J.-B.-A. Suard JEFFREY SMITTEN Part II: Sojourns Abroad 5 ‘The Only Disagreeable Thing in the Whole’: the Selection and Experience of the British Hostages for the Delivery of Cape Breton in Paris, 1748-49 ROBIN EAGLES 6 Peregrinations to the Convent: Hester Thrale Piozzi and Ann Radcliffe TONYA MOUTRAY MCARTHUR 7 Friend or Foe? French Émigrés Discover Britain ROSENA DAVISON 8 ‘Genuine Anecdotes’: Mary Charlton and Revolutionary Celebrity GILLIAN DOW Part III: Intellectual and Artistic Exchanges 9 Two Partial English-Language Translations of the Encyclopédie: The Encyclopedias of John Barrow and Temple Henry Croker JEFF LOVELAND 10 British Biography in the Encyclopédie méthodique: Histoire KATHLEEN HARDESTY DOIG 11 Diderot, Dentistry and British Politics: Two Neglected Pamphlets DAVID ADAMS 12 British and French Influences on Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer DEIDRE DAWSON 13 A Commonwealth of Connoisseurs: British Humanism in the Art and Science of the Ancien Régime ELIZABETH LIEBMAN 14 An Anglo-Swiss Connection in the Age of Voltaire: Jean Huber’s British Friends and Relations GARRY APGAR

The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman

The Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman
Author: Caroline Robbins
Publisher: Cambridge, Harvard U. P
Total Pages: 486
Release: 1959
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

"Bibliographical commentary": pages 389-398. Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. 403-443) Introduction -- Some seventeenth-century commonwealthmen -- The Whigs of the Revolution and of the Sacheverell trial -- Robert Molesworth and his friends in England, 1693-1727 -- The case of Ireland -- The interest of Scotland -- The contribution of nonconformity -- Staunch Whigs and Republicans of the reign of George II (1727-1760) -- Honest Whigs under George III, 1761-1789 -- Conclusion.

Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688-1756

Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688-1756
Author: Andrew C. Thompson
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781843832416

A new examination of the links between religion and politics in the early eighteenth century, showing how the defence of protestantism became a major plank in foreign policy. Religious ideas and power-politics were strongly connected in the early eighteenth century: William III, George I and George II all took their role as defenders of the protestant faith extremely seriously, and confessional thinking was of major significance to court whiggery. This book considers the importance of this connection. It traces the development of ideas of the protestant interest, explaining how such ideas were used to combat the perceived threats to the European states system posed by universal monarchy, and showing how the necessity of defending protestantism within Europe became a theme in British and Hanoverian foreign policy. Drawing on a wide range of printed and manuscript material in both Britain and Germany, the book emphasises the importance of a European context for eighteenth-century British history, and contributes to debates about the justification of monarchy and the nature of identity in Britain. Dr ANDREW C. THOMPSON is Lecturer in History, Queens' College, Cambridge.

The Pleasures of the Imagination

The Pleasures of the Imagination
Author: John Brewer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226074191

John Brewer's landmark book brings to life the rich cultural life of eighteenth-century England. He describes 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. "A magnificent achievement. . . . Enormous in its scope, astute in its choices of examples, learned in its resources, but written with an almost unfailing lucidity and accessibility." —David A. Bell, New Republic "Brewer takes us on a grand tour of the exciting, fluid, often raucous world of the 18th-century arts. . . . A brilliantly illustrated social history." —T. H. Breen, New York Times Book Review "Every so often a work of intellectual history comes along that reinvigorates the common reader's interest in the past. . . . Exhilarating. . . . No one interested in modern intellectual history should miss it." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post

English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century

English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Sir Leslie Stephen
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
Total Pages: 134
Release:
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1465506985

When I was honoured by the invitation to deliver this course of lectures, I did not accept without some hesitation. I am not qualified to speak with authority upon such subjects as have been treated by my predecessors—the course of political events or the growth of legal institutions. My attention has been chiefly paid to the history of literature, and it might be doubtful whether that study is properly included in the phrase 'historical.' Yet literature expresses men's thoughts and passions, which have, after all, a considerable influence upon their lives. The writer of a people's songs, as we are told, may even have a more powerful influence than the maker of their laws. He certainly reveals more directly the true springs of popular action. The truth has been admitted by many historians who are too much overwhelmed by state papers to find space for any extended application of the method. No one, I think, has shown more clearly how much light could be derived from this source than your Oxford historian J. R. Green, in some brilliant passages of his fascinating book. Moreover, if I may venture to speak of myself, my own interest in literature has always been closely connected with its philosophical and social significance. Literature may of course be studied simply for its own intrinsic merits. But it may also be regarded as one manifestation of what is called 'the spirit of the age.' I have, too, been much impressed by a further conclusion. No one doubts that the speculative movement affects the social and political—I think that less attention has been given to the reciprocal influence. The philosophy of a period is often treated as though it were the product of impartial and abstract investigation—something worked out by the great thinker in his study and developed by simple logical deductions from the positions established by his predecessors. To my mind, though I cannot now dwell upon the point, the philosophy of an age is in itself determined to a very great extent by the social position. It gives the solutions of the problems forced upon the reasoner by the practical conditions of his time. To understand why certain ideas become current, we have to consider not merely the ostensible logic but all the motives which led men to investigate the most pressing difficulties suggested by the social development. Obvious principles are always ready, like germs, to come to life when the congenial soil is provided. And what is true of the philosophy is equally, and perhaps more conspicuously, true of the artistic and literary embodiment of the dominant ideas which are correlated with the social movement.