Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry

Interpreting the Eighteenth-Century English Family

In this exhaustive exploration of several genres of fiction, Ruth Perry argues that a seismic change in the basis of kinship occurred in eighteenth-century England, from a primary kin group rooted in “consanguineal” ties to one rooted in “conjugal” ties. In other words: “the biologically given family into which one was born was gradually becoming secondary to the chosen family constructed by ma...

“Antitheatrical Theatricalism” on the Eighteenth- Century English Stage

Poetry and the Common Weal: Conceiving Civic Utility in British Poetics of the Long Eighteenth Century

This dissertation pursues a twofold proposition: writers of the long eighteenth century widely presumed that poetry influenced the “common weal” (the common wellbeing, conceived as a national community); and this expectation guided poetic composition even at the level of strategy or “design.” I demonstrate this claim in a series of three case studies, each of which delineates an elaborate, inte...

Eighteenth-Century Europe

Chapter 6: Varieties of the Public Sphere To this point, we have encountered changes, as well as continuity, in European politics, economics, society, and thought. Each of these developments contributed to a transformation that some consider the most fundamental transformation of the century -the emergence, between the state sector and private economic sphere, of autonomous institutions of civi...

Eighteenth-Century Europe