The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and ...Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.
Influential critics including Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen have characterised the metamodern turn as politically reenergizing aesthetic practices with a mixture of ...hope and irony after a period of postmodern cynicism. While such studies have examined political movements or individual writers, few have examined how the metamodern shift affects the habitus of British artists and intellectuals who are the current instantiation of what Alan Sinfield calls the 'dissident middle class'. Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet wrestles with that very question as she populates her four novels with characters whose conversations about art and politics revise tropes of metropolitan cynicism common in postmodern British literature and scholarship. Smith's colliding representations of historical and fictional artists reflect a 'porous' aesthetic approach to the novel that combines fiction, ekphrasis, and contemporary politics and reimagines Britain's 'dissident middle' counterpublic. Smith's metamodern vision of a counterpublic sphere affirms the civic role of artists and intellectuals yet ironically tempers the novels' utopic moments with acknowledgments of other characters' barriers to participation in the counterpublic. The Seasonals present a distinct theoretical approach to the relationship between art and politics by blurring boundaries between a fictional counterpublic and the author and her readers' public sphere.
The concept of the border evoked by the title of the present volume provides a central interpretative key for our project at more than one level, as it is suggestive both of Scotland as a ...theoretical borderland in relation to the Empire and postcoloniality, and of our attempt at bringing into dialogue scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, including Scottish, Celtic and postcolonial studies. The Scotland of the present volumes title is thus suggestive of a critical standpoint.
Meaning/fulness Hack, Daniel
Victorian literature and culture,
01/2023, Letnik:
51, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Talk of meaning and meaningfulness, ubiquitous today, only emerges in the nineteenth century. This emergence remains to be explained and calls into question accounts of modernity that treat “meaning” ...as a stable, timeless concept.
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