Introduction

Author(s):  
Joshua Billings

This introductory chapter provides an overview of tragedy. Tragedy is the most philosophical of art forms. However, tragedy has not always been philosophical in the same way. Around 1800, tragedy's way of meaning underwent a major shift, with broad consequences for thought on literature and philosophy. Through the eighteenth century, tragedy had been considered primarily in rhetorical terms as a way of producing a certain emotional effect, but since 1800 it has more often been considered in speculative terms as a way of making sense of the human world. It is only since around 1800 that works of art have been considered in such philosophical and often metaphysical terms. Greek tragedy played a leading role in this development, as the foundation for elaborating a concept of “the tragic” that extended far beyond an aesthetic context, encompassing history, politics, religion, and ontology.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin

This chapter explores the range of ideas and activities that engaged Quaker women educators during the eighteenth century, a critical period in the development of Friends’ educational efforts. It analyses key writings of Deborah Bell, Rebecca Jones, and Priscilla Wakefield. These women adopted a variety of approaches to instructing youth, ranging from informal mentorship to formal teaching that stressed a ‘guarded’ (Quaker-only) environment. Bell, Jones, and Wakefield shed light on the leading role that Quaker women played in the education and socialization of young Friends. Their writings highlight the importance of the meetinghouse, the schoolhouse, and the printed word as public venues for women who sought to instil Quaker values in future generations.


Author(s):  
Paula Yates

This chapter argues that the chief features which distinguished Welsh Anglicanism from English in this period were its poverty, its remote position, and its almost entirely rural nature, at least until the rapid expansion of population associated with the Industrial Revolution. It argues that Anglican clergy in Wales in this period were generally Welsh and Welsh-speaking, and that they enjoyed good relations with their Dissenting neighbours until the last decades of the eighteenth century. It compares and contrasts the effects of the two eighteenth-century Evangelical revivals and describes the attempts to educate the poor, especially through circulating schools. Finally, it discusses the leading role played by Anglicans in the romantic revival of Wales’s Celtic culture and traces the hardening of relations with Dissenters, especially in the somewhat wealthier north, from about the 1790s.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.


Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
James Noggle

This introductory chapter discusses the peculiar combination of the unfelt emergence and motions of strongly felt feelings, which appears all over eighteenth-century writing. The usages express something deep but inexplicit about how affect was understood in the eighteenth century, how feeling, passions, the emotions, and even perception itself were seen subtly to come into existence and move people. Instead of drawing attention to itself as an especially significant, well-defined concept or idea, a word like insensibly occurs almost in passing in the period's writing. But this unstudied casualness, far from rendering its meaning insignificant, holds a key to its power. A scarcely noticed but crucial and consistent set of gestures to an affect that cannot be felt: that is the terrain this book explores. Instead of indicating a mere lack of feeling—an affective blockage, impassivity, stupefaction—insensibly unfolding processes initiate and build strong feeling or make it possible.


This introductory chapter provides brief descriptions of the roles of merchants, shipbrokers and agents, and defines stevedoring and porterage. The chapter focuses in particular on the maritime development of Liverpool from the eighteenth century and uses resources from Merseyside Maritime Museum to provide records and accounts of merchants, ship brokers and agents, and stevedoring and warehousing companies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Alejandro Linares-Cantillo

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the twenty essays compiled for the XIII conference of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia, which was held in Bogota in January of 2019. The collection is divided into three thematic parts which illustrate five subjects at the spotlight of comparative constitutional law, in light of the growing circulation and intensification of the idea of constitutionalism. The first part examines the evolving and leading role of constitutional courts in constitutional democracies. The second part allows constitutional experiences speak for themselves and discusses tensions and debates in three topics: (A) the growing trend to judicially enforce 'constitutional unamendability' under the doctrine of 'unconstitutional constitutional amendments'; (B) the idea of 'transformative constitutionalism' in the area of social rights enforcement; and (C) the models of transitional justice and their implementation in the Colombian case. Finally, the third part analyses vertical and horizontal movements of constitutional law doctrines and decisions.


This introductory chapter provides context for the volume’s subsequent contributions on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a variety of levels. It begins by explaining its aims with regard to the relationship between philosophy and literature. It then locates Goethe’s novel within this set of aims in three ways: first, by providing a brief outline of Goethe’s career; second, by locating his novel in the literary-historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; and third, by outlining the connections between the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and specific philosophers and thinkers who influenced his thought and for whom his work was in turn influential.


Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.


Author(s):  
L. Poundie Burstein

Musical form is often discussed by appealing to metaphors that compare formal sections either to types of containers or to segments of journeys. Although both metaphors are usually combined and used interchangeably by most music analysts, since the nineteenth century container metaphors for form have tended to dominate. This contrasts with what was witnessed during the eighteenth century, where journey metaphors for musical form were more prevalent. The introductory chapter broadly compares container metaphors and journal metaphors for form, especially as they apply to sonata-form expositions in works composed during the Galant era. This chapter also introduces some of the features that tend to distinguish eighteenth-century formal discussions from modern ones, and it concludes with a preview of some of the strategies to be explored in subsequent chapters.


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