The Wild Girl Natural Man And The Monster

Author : Julia V. Douthwaite
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2010-11-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226160573

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The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster by Julia V. Douthwaite Pdf

This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized. A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.

Author : Vanita Seth
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2010-08-03
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780822392941

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Europe's Indians by Vanita Seth Pdf

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

Author : Trevor Levere,Larry Stewart,Hugh Torrens,Joseph Wachelder
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-11-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781315411927

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The Enlightenment of Thomas Beddoes by Trevor Levere,Larry Stewart,Hugh Torrens,Joseph Wachelder Pdf

Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808) lived in ‘decidedly interesting times’ in which established orders in politics and science were challenged by revolutionary new ideas. Enthusiastically participating in the heady atmosphere of Enlightenment debate, Beddoes' career suffered from his radical views on politics and science. Denied a professorship at Oxford, he set up a medical practice in Bristol in 1793. Six years later - with support from a range of leading industrialists and scientists including the Wedgwoods, Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, James Keir and others associated with the Lunar Society - he established a Pneumatic Institution for investigating the therapeutic effects of breathing different kinds of ‘air’ on a wide spectrum of diseases. The treatment of the poor, gratis, was an important part of the Pneumatic Institution and Beddoes, who had long concerned himself with their moral and material well-being, published numerous pamphlets and small books about their education, wretched material circumstances, proper nutrition, and the importance of affordable medical facilities. Beddoes’ democratic political concerns reinforced his belief that chemistry and medicine should co-operate to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. But those concerns also polarized the medical profession and the wider community of academic chemists and physicians, many of whom became mistrustful of Beddoes’ projects due to his radical politics. Highlighting the breadth of Beddoes’ concerns in politics, chemistry, medicine, geology, and education (including the use of toys and models), this book reveals how his reforming and radical zeal were exemplified in every aspect of his public and professional life, and made for a remarkably coherent program of change. He was frequently a contrarian, but not without cause, as becomes apparent once he is viewed in the round, as part of the response to the politics and social pressures of the late Enlightenment.

Author : Andrew Billing
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2023-12-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781003812487

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Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing by Andrew Billing Pdf

Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.

Author : Eileen Hunt Botting
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780812249620

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Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child by Eileen Hunt Botting Pdf

In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting contends that Frankenstein is a profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Author : Touba Ghadessi
Publisher : Medieval Institute Publications
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2018-03-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781580442763

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Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance by Touba Ghadessi Pdf

At the center of this interdisciplinary study are court monsters--dwarves, hirsutes, and misshapen individuals--who, by their very presence, altered Renaissance ethics vis-a-vis anatomical difference, social virtues, and scientific knowledge. The study traces how these monsters evolved from objects of curiosity, to scientific cases, to legally independent beings. The works examined here point to the intricate cultural, religious, ethical, and scientific perceptions of monstrous individuals who were fixtures in contemporary courts.

Author : Richard Nash
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : English literature
ISBN : 0813921651

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Wild Enlightenment by Richard Nash Pdf

Shifting perspective from the thematic approach of intellectual history to a more eclectic cultural criticism, Nash introduces a refreshing means to understanding both the figures of the wild man and the citizen of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

Author : Gregory Claeys
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 569 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Dystopias
ISBN : 9780198785682

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Dystopia by Gregory Claeys Pdf

Dystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this volume redefines thecentral concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject.Part One assesses the theory and prehistory of "dystopia". By contrast to utopia, conceived as promoting an ideal of friendship defined as "enhanced sociability", dystopia is defined by estrangement, fear, and the proliferation of "enemy" categories. A "natural history" of dystopia thus concentratesupon the centrality of the passion or emotion of fear and hatred in modern despotisms. The work of Le Bon, Freud, and others is used to show how dystopian groups use such emotions. Utopia and dystopia are portrayed not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum of sociability, defined by aheightened form of group identity. The prehistory of the process whereby 'enemies' are demonised is explored from early conceptions of monstrosity through Christian conceptions of the devil and witchcraft, and the persecution of heresy.Part Two surveys the major dystopian moments in twentieth century despotisms, focussing in particular upon Nazi Germany, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. The concentration here is upon the political religion hypothesis as a key explanation for the chiefexcesses of communism in particular.Part Three examines literary dystopias. It commences well before the usual starting-point in the secondary literature, in anti-Jacobin writings of the 1790s. Two chapters address the main twentieth-century texts usually studied as representative of the genre, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World andGeorge Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remainder of the section examines the evolution of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century down to the present.

Author : Alexa Wright
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 124 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-06-30
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780857733351

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Monstrosity by Alexa Wright Pdf

From the 'Monster of Ravenna' to the 'Elephant Man', Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of 'real', human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance. Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is 'normal' and what is not.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 876 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Learning and scholarship
ISBN : UOM:39015062060598

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Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen wissenschaftlicher Literatur by Anonim Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Symbolism
ISBN : UVA:X004630034

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Representations by Anonim Pdf

Author : Anne Maria Good
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 1010 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Ethnology
ISBN : MINN:31951P007899877

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Primitive Man and the Enlightened Observer by Anne Maria Good Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 1426 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Books
ISBN : UOM:39015066121404

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Book Review Index by Anonim Pdf

Every 3rd issue is a quarterly cumulation.

Author : Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Belgium)
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Art, Belgian
ISBN : UOM:39015042466873

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Annual Antwerp Royal Museum by Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Belgium) Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 664 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Academic libraries
ISBN : STANFORD:36105021116202

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Choice by Anonim Pdf