1650-1850 v. 16: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era - Hardcover

1650-1850: Ideas, AEsthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era takes a focused but multidisciplinary approach to the ""long eighteenth century,"" the two hundred years during which the writers and artists explored, developed, and represented a complex program of modernization or ""Enlightenment."" Covering a period that begins with the revolutionary thought of Thomas Hobbes and the surprising establishment of a Commonwealth government and that ends with the careers of William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, 1650-1850 publishes essays treating the aesthetic and philosophical side of this period of deep social transformation. This annual includes studies on the literature, philosophy, theology, art, music, architecture, and personalities of the period. It publishes many essays on British topics but also includes studies from various cultures, from Vietnam and Romania to Peru and the arctic. It seeks to discover connections among the various arts and intellectual pursuits and also to provide a venue for specialized studies not suitable for less experimental journals. 1650-1850 always includes fifteen to twenty extended reviews, reviews that examine major scholarly studies and editions in detail and with robust honesty. Volume 16 - Contents: Foreword; Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl, ""Colors in Trade: The Palette of the Goods and Commodities of Early-Modern England"" ; Yu Liu, ""The Catalyst for Change: Chinese Sharawadgi and English Hortricultural Naturalism""; Rosamaria Loretelli, ""David Hume's Reader-Response Narratology: A New Perspective on the Rise of the Novel""; Deborah Kennedy, ""British Portraits of Women Reading""; Lisa Moody, ""Edmond Hoyle's Treatises on Whist: Literary Piracy in the Eighteenth Century""; Roger D. Lund, ""'The Filagree Game': Imitations and Mock Form in Pope's Pastorals""; Jean-Paul Forster, ""From Cartographic to Topographic Representations of the Sea""; Merlin E. Blaine, ""The Representative Body, the Severed Head, and the Rump: Figurations of the English State, 1640-1662""; Norbert Col, ""Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France: Cross-Channel Representations"".

Kevin L. Cope's In and After the Beginning contends the centrality of beginnings to notions of narrative, philosophy, and history that were newly emerging in the eighteenth century, calling into question the usual critical habit of focusing on endings - following the chronological progress of a plot to its climactic conclusion. Challenging traditional approaches that ""shoot past early-eigtheenth-century ephemera in order to get quickly to climactic celebrities like Jane Austen or Samuel Taylor Coleridge,"" Cope argues that the idea of beginnings, and the convergence of disparate narrative and historical parts into new starting points, are not background tendencies: they are central concerns that underwrite all new genre and social institutions of the era. Students and scholars of the long eighteenth century will appreciate Cope's fundamental depiction of literary and social progress as complex phenomena borne of vast arrays of events, rather than of linear steps, will address any reader interested in narratology, historicity, and even postmodernity.