Louis XIV dies after seventy-two years on the throne. A Jacobite uprising in Scotland on behalf of the Old Pretender ends in fiasco. Colen Campbell creates interest in the Palladian style in Britain with the publication of his Vitruvius Britannicus.
The Habsburg emperor Charles VI has a son, but the child dies within the year. The earl of Burlington employs Colen Campbell to remodel his Piccadilly house in the Palladian style. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, observing the Turkish practice of inoculation against smallpox, submits her infant son to the treatment.
The tsarevitch Alexis, heir to Peter the Great, dies from violence inflicted on him in prison. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , with its detailed realism, can be seen as the first English novel. The lighter rococo style, beginning in France, becomes an extension of the baroque. Go to rococo in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. The symphony begins to develop as a musical form, deriving from the overtures of operas. Go to symphony in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.
The postchaise, introduced in France, provides the first chance of reasonably comfortable travel by land. Go to post-chaise noun in Oxford Dictionary of English 3 ed. Like the symphony, the string quartet develops during the eighteenth century, moving from simple beginnings to great complexity.
Go to string quartet noun in Oxford Dictionary of English 3 ed. Two political parties emerge in Sweden's parliament and become known as the Hats and the Caps.
Shares in John Law's Louisiana Company rise spectacularly and then collapse, in what becomes known as the Mississippi Bubble. The Dalai Lama in Lhasa accepts Chinese imperial protection, which lasts until Young noblemen, particularly from Britain, visit Italy on the Grand Tour. Go to grand tour in A Dictionary of British History 1 rev ed. Canaletto begins to specialize in views of the Venetian canals, finding his main customers among the British. Go to Canaletto — in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.
In the treaty of Nystad Sweden cedes Estonia to Russia together with most of Latvia the rest of which soon follows. Robert Walpole becomes Britain's chief minister and holds the post for an unrivalled span of twenty-one years. With the transfer of Swedish territory on the Baltic coast, Russia becomes the dominant power in the region. In a ceremony in St Petersburg's cathedral Peter the Great has himself proclaimed 'emperor of all Russia'. Jean-Antoine Watteau paints the most splendid shop sign in history, for his friend Gersaint.
Go to Iroquois Confederacy in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Easter Island is reached by the Dutch, beginning a spate of European discovery in the islands of the Pacific. Go to Franklin, Benjamin —90 in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. The Austrian emperor, Charles VI, agrees that Hungary shall be ruled as a separate kingdom within his empire. General Wade, commander-in-chief of North Britain, begins an impressive programme of road construction in the Scottish Highlands.
Vivaldi publishes the set of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. Go to Vivaldi, Antonio — in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Jonathan Swift sends his hero on a series of bitterly satirical travels in Gulliver's Travels. Handel composes Zadok the Priest for the crowning of George II, and it has been sung at every subsequent British coronation. The Danish explorer Vitus Bering sails into Arctic seas through the strait between Asia and America known now by his name. Benjamin Franklin prints, publishes and largely writes the weekly Pennsylvania Gazette.
The Italian poet Metastasio produces, in Vienna, opera libretti which are used by almost every composer of the day. English maker of telescopes John Hadley designs the instrument which evolves into the standard sextant used at sea.
Go to sextant in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Benjamin Franklin sets up a subscription library, the Library Company of Philadelphia. Georgia is granted to a group of British philanthropists, to give a new start in life to debtors. Military 1 ed. With the performance of Esther Handel taps a rich new vein, the English oratorio.
An alliance between the French and Spanish Bourbons is the first of what become known as the Family Compacts. Go to Bourbons in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.
Voltaire publishes a series of Philosophical Letters comparing the French unfavourably with England. John Kay, working in the Lancashire woollen industry, patents the flying shuttle to speed up weaving. Go to Kay, John —c. Benjamin Franklin establishes the most successful of America's almanacs, publishing it annually until The Asam brothers build at their own expense the tiny and brilliant baroque church of St John Nepomuk, attached to their own house in Munich. Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus publishes a 'system of nature', capable of classifying all living things.
John Peter Zenger, editor of the Weekly Journal , is acquitted of libelling the governor of New York on the grounds that what he published was true. Swedish chemist Georg Brandt discovers a new metallic element, which he names cobalt. The leader of a gang of tribal brigands seizes the Persian throne and takes the name Nadir Shah. Florence loses her independence when the last Medici duke of Tuscany dies. Go to Medici in Oxford Dictionary of English 3 ed. Britain declares war on Spain, partly in a mood of indignation over Captain Jenkins' ear.
The Persian ruler Nadir Shah enters Delhi and removes much of the accumulated treasure of the Mughal empire.
David Hume publishes his Treatise of Human Nature , in which he applies to the human mind the principles of experimental science. Frederick II, inheriting the throne in Prussia, establishes a cultured and musical court. A charismatic leader, Baal Shem Tov, develops Hasidism in Poland as an influential revivalist movement within Judaism.
Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni makes a success of plays in the ancient commedia dell'arte tradition. Jack Broughton, champion of England, opens an academy to teach 'the mystery of boxing, that wholly British art'.
Go to broughtonian n. The American Magazine and the General Magazine both begin a short-lived existence. Bach publishes his set of Goldberg Variations , supposedly written for performance by the young harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. Frederick's Prussian army defeats the Austrians at Mollwitz, securing his hold on most of Silesia. Venice's new theatre, the Teatro Novissimo, has machinery which can change the scenes in the blink of an eye.
French and Bavarian armies join the war against Austria, marching through upper Austria into Bohemia. Spain, now an ally of France, joins in the war against Austria. Britain, already fighting Spain in the War of Jenkin's Ear , is drawn into the wider conflict as an ally of Austria.
French and Bavarian forces enter Prague, one of the most important cities in the Austrian empire. An Austrian army captures the Bavarian capital city, Munich. Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius proposes degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water. Edmond Hoyle publishes the definitive rules of whist. Go to whist in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Benjamin Franklin drafts in Philadelphia the founding document for the American Philosophical Society.
Muhammad ibn Saud begins the expansion of power that will lead eventually to the establishment of Saudi Arabia. France formally declares war on Britain half way through the War of the Austrian Succession.
Bach publishes another set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, as an addition to his previous Well-Tempered Clavier. New England militiamen achieve an unexpected success in capturing the fortress of Louisbourg from the French. The principle of the Leyden jar is discovered by an amateur German physicist, Ewald Georg von Kleist, dean of the cathedral in Kamin. Go to Leyden jar in A Dictionary of Physics 6 ed.
Charles Edward Stuart marches as far south as Derby, but then turns back. Frederick the Great's Prussian soldiers, advancing in shallow disciplined formation, outclass other armies of the time. Frederick II's three victories in cause him to be known by his contemporaries as Frederick the Great.
Frederick the Great begins to build the summer palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam. Tartan and Highland dress are banned by the British government, in a prohibition not lifted until Go to tartan in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.
An earthquake destroys much of Lima, and an ensuing tidal wave engulfs its port at Callao. Go to Lima in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.
Monsieur Passemont constructs in Paris a millennium clock which can record the date in any year up to AD Go to Paris in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. A tribal leader, Ahmad Shah Abdali, is elected king of the Afghans in an event seen as the foundation of the Afghan nation. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa begins the correspondence that grows into the longest novel in the English language. Systematic digging begins near Vesuvius, in an area where ancient fragments are often unearthed - soon discovered to be Pompeii.
The peace treaty returns all captured territories to their owners — with the exception of Silesia, which becomes part of Prussia. A French official travels down the Ohio valley, placing markers to claim it for France.
Henry Fielding introduces a character of lasting appeal in the lusty but good-hearted Tom Jones. Shortly before his death in J. Bach completes his Mass in B Minor , worked on over many years.
Naval engagements are now fought in lines of battle, with only the most heavily armed vessels rated as 'ships of the line'. Horace Walpole begins to create his own Strawberry Hill, a neo-Gothic fantasy, on the banks of the Thames west of London. Robert Clive prevails over the French after holding out during the seven-week siege of Arcot in southern India. The Swedish chemist Alex Cronstedt identifies an impurity in copper ore as a separate metallic element, which he names nickel.
Go to nickel in Oxford Dictionary of English 3 ed. By the time of his death the prolific output of Domenico Scarlatti includes sonatas, all but a few for his own instrument, the harpsichord. Go to Scarlatti, Domenico — in World Encyclopedia 1 ed.
English gardener Lancelot Brown sets up in business as a freelance 'improver of grounds', and soon acquires the nickname Capability Brown.
Britain is one of the last nations to adjust to the more accurate Gregorian calendar, causing a suspicious public to fear they have been robbed of eleven days. English obstetrician William Smellie introduces scientific midwifery as a result of his researches into childbirth. Go to midwifery in Concise Medical Dictionary 8 ed. The French seize or evict every English-speaking trader in the region of the upper Ohio. Benjamin Franklin flies a kite into a thunder cloud to demonstrate the nature of electricity.
George Washington undertakes a difficult and ineffectual journey to persuade the French to withdraw from the Ohio valley. In Freedom of Will American evangelist Jonathan Edwards makes an uncompromising defence of orthodox against liberal Calvinism. Benjamin Franklin's chopped-up snake, urging union of the colonies with the caption 'Join or Die', is the first American political cartoon.
Quaker minister John Woolman publishes the first part of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes , an essay denouncing slavery. Scottish chemist Joseph Black identifies the existence of a gas, carbon dioxide, which he calls 'fixed air'.
Benjamin Franklin proposes to the Albany Congress that the colonies should unite to form a colonial government. The British colonies negotiate with the Iroquois at the Albany Congress, in the face of the French threat in the Ohio valley.
Francesco Guardi, previously a painter of figures, begins to specialize in view of Venice, his native city. Go to Guardi, Francesco 5 Oct. Samuel Johnson publishes his magisterial Dictionary of the English Language. The first Conestoga wagons are acquired by George Washington for an expedition through the Alleghenies. Go to covered wagon noun in New Oxford American Dictionary 3 ed.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann publishes a book on Greek painting and sculpture which introduces a new strand of neoclassicism. The French in America, under the marquis of Montcalm, begin two highly successful years of campaigning against the British. In what becomes known as the Diplomatic Revolution, two of Europe's long-standing rivals - France and Austria - sign a treaty of alliance.
Frederick the Great again precipitates a European conflict, marching without warning into Saxony and launching the Seven Years' War.
Admiral John Byng is shot on the deck of a ship in Portsmouth harbour for 'neglect of duty' in failing to relieve Minorca. Robert Clive defeats the nawab of Bengal at the battle of Plassey, and places his own man on the throne. Robert Adam returns to Britain after two years in Rome with a repertoire of classical themes which he mingles to form a new British neoclassicism. William Pitt the Elder becomes secretary of state and transforms the British war effort against France in America.
English painter Joseph Wright sets up a studio in his home town, Derby. Go to Wright, Joseph 3 Sept. Joshua Reynolds is by now the most fashionable portrait painter in London, copies with as many as sitters in a year. A comet returns exactly at the time predicted by English astronomer Edmond Halley, and is subsequently known by his name. James Woodforde, an English country parson with a love of food and wine, begins a detailed diary of everyday life.
Liverpool-born artist George Stubbs sets up in London as a painter, above all, of people and horses. Portrait-painter Thomas Gainsborough moves from Suffolk to set up a studio in fashionable Bath.
Voltaire publishes Candide , a satire on optimism prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of The Portuguese expel the Jesuits from Brazil, beginning a widespread reaction against the order in Catholic Europe. Go to Jesuits in World Encyclopedia 1 ed. Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood sets up a factory of his own in his home town of Burslem.
Frederick the Great suffers his first major defeat, by a Russian and Austrian army at Kunersdorf. Laurence Sterne publishes the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy , beginning with the scene at the hero's conception.
Wolfe defeats Montcalm and captures Quebec, but both commanders die in the engagement. A succession of victories cause to be known in Britain as annus mirabilis , the wonderful year.
Active Oldest Votes. So we are saddled with a confusing nomentclature. Improve this answer. JeremyC JeremyC 3, 7 7 silver badges 14 14 bronze badges. Are you sure about the inventors of our calendar? The Anno Domini dating system was invented in the 6th century and didn't become firmly established until later, but zero had been used in calculating Easter in the 4th century.
In any case, even with a well-understood concept of zero, why would anyone want to call what we call the 1st century the 0th century? Which century is year 1 AD in? The "zeroth century" is not something that would come naturally to anyone, even computer programmers.
And anyway, it would be wrong because it is the first century. From 1 AD to AD. The first years. Then the second century starts in AD. Confusing, no? Up to the 20th century which was either to , or to a 99 year century! It isn't confusing if you stop and think, as CJDennis says. Your first year of life is the time before you are one year old.
The nineteenth century was the century up to KateBunting Absolutely: similarly the first hundred miles of a journey are miles 1 to Europe, in , had just met the future. Throughout the preceding century, its people—the educated part, at least—had felt that progress was constant, rational, and gentle. Then, in one great explosion, everything changed. The French Revolution, which began in , created a new, fierce, often bloody world.
No king, no church, no aristocracy; these were such shocking novelties that the other European Powers—Prussia, Austria, Great Britain—banded together to restore the old order. By , it was clear that they had failed. They still had their own churches and monarchies, but all their leaders, political and intellectual, understood that they were facing not just a new century but a new world. Whatever happened, Europe was leading the way. Because of these changes, and because they owned much of the rest of' the globe, the Europeans were convinced that they were the only people who really mattered.
Those parts they did not control were either too wild or too strange to be really desirable. All of North and South America, together with their assorted islands, had long been colonized, even if the United States was now independent; Great Britain had spawned cities on the edge of India and, from them, armed expeditions were conquering an empire; as for Africa, all that was wanted was the occasional trading port to tap the resources of that continent—slaves, gold, and ivory.
That, to be sure, left out a few major powers: Asia, the Europeans thought, consisted essentially of China, which was seen mainly as a source of porcelain, exotic silks, and lacquerwork; Japan, fiercely closed on itself; a few spice islands; and Siam, a funny kingdom where desirable tropical woods were easily found. Then there was Turkey. Its sultan still ruled over a vast empire that included the entire Middle East, Turkey itself, Armenia, Georgia, most of the shores of the Black Sea, almost all the Balkan peninsula today's Rumania, Bulgaria, and former Yugoslavia , as well as Greece.
Only a century earlier, in , Vienna had been besieged and nearly taken by a Turkish army; hut by the s, this once mighty giant was in full decadence. Russia ate steadily at its Black Sea possessions; Egypt had become semi-independent.
The question now was a simple one: what to do with the Turkish empire's many possessions when it finally collapsed. Indeed, the non-European world was seen mainly as a source of tropical goods—slaves, sugar, spices, coffee, tea, ivory, rare woods, gold, silver. There was a fierce rivalry between Spain, France, and England when it came to this kind of trade, with each country either defending its possessions Spain or trying to extend them England.
As a result, the Seven Years' War , in a haphazard and disorganized way, had become the first of the world wars. Fighting took place not just on the traditional European battlefields, but as far away as the South Indian coast and the frozen wastes of Canada, and so it was a rehearsal of sorts for the real world war that followed, the conflict which had begun in between revolutionary France and the rest of Europe and became the Napoleonic Wars before it finally ended in In , armies and navies were fighting from the Netherlands to the southern tip of Africa, from Italy to India.
Of course, other peoples, on other continents, felt very differently about their relative importance. The emperor of China, for instance, knew very well that he ruled the only worthwhile portion of the earth, and the Koreans, next door, never forgot it; the shah of Persia, although he had to acknowledge that the sultan was a worthy rival, still considered himself a mighty potentate, as did the sultan himself.
And inside Africa, local kings reigned in the full enjoyment of their own importance. Was Europe, then, really the center of the world? Yes, in that it was entering a second period in which its power expanded throughout the known world the first had seen the conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century. There were a number of reasons for this, not the least of which was the development of the new technologies that had brought about the Industrial Revolution.
Mechanical looms; faster, more destructive guns; more complex metallurgical techniques; the mass production of consumer goods; all these were new and unequaled elsewhere in the world. Just as important, these changes were financed by the development of banking and credit. As a result, Europe, economically and militarily, had become much the most powerful of all the continents. It also mattered that the Europeans saw themselves as the most civilized people in the history of the planet.
The Greeks and the Romans, they felt, had made a good beginning; Alexander and Caesar, Aristotle and Cicero were household names among the middle and upper classes; but then the Dark Ages had come, those times of superstition and ignorance. By the end of the eighteenth century, though, reason ruled once again. This was the Enlightenment: the light of intelligence, logic, and knowledge had dispelled the darkness.
For the first time, intellectuals, scientists, and those who read them felt sure that they could, eventually, understand the world because it was ruled by unchangeable principles, not the whim of a deity or the power of magic.
Many laws of nature had yet to be discovered—science was, after all, still young—but the ultimate result was hardly in doubt. In the same way, the many species of animals and plants were being rapidly cataloged.
No one believed any longer in the existence, somewhere far away, of strange, unlikely creatures. There was, in fact, nothing that could not be ascertained by rational inquiry. Nor could people be prevented, any longer, from exploring subjects rejected by religious dogma. The history of the world was one of these subjects; virtually no educated person, at the end of the eighteenth century. That same attitude applied to sciences like physics and chemistry.
Although the Catholic Church had reluctantly admitted that the earth was round and that it circled the sun, it held firm to quite a number of other strange beliefs, which none but the very pious still respected. At the same time, religious tolerance was rapidly gaining ground, despite the opposition of the various established churches. In Prussia, Frederick the Great had allowed both Catholic and Protestant cathedrals to be built in Berlin—no doubt, it helped that he cared nothing for religion.
Even in France, a country from which Protestantism had been banned in , toleration was appearing; finally, in , the French had been allowed to worship as they pleased. Even more striking, great numbers of educated people felt able to reject all religious teaching—a few because they were atheists; most because, like Voltaire, George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, they were deists. They thought that there must be a Supreme Being, but were unwilling to let themselves be hemmed in by a specific theology.
All this made for more freedom of thought than ever before: it also convinced the Europeans that, in this area as well, they led the world. And indeed, this new openness, this thirst for scientific knowledge, resulted in new techniques that gave Europe an even bigger lead over the other continents. The Europeans themselves never doubted what they saw as their intrinsic superiority.
Little was known about Asian or African gods; but everyone agreed that the rankest superstition ruled those continents.
Equally, no one thought that any of those distant cultures might be as rich, as advanced as the European; there was only one right way of doing things—and many wrong ways. It was not the least shocking part of the Marquis de Sade's books that he was a cultural relativist, a man who thought that since the very same act could be praiseworthy in one place, and a dreadful sin in another, there was no superior civilization: the only thing that mattered in the end was to do precisely what one pleased.
Those who viewed change with distaste clung firmly to the old standards and had absolute values. They believed that God the deity was either Catholic or Protestant, depending on the location had created a perfectly ordered hierarchy, in which the king was on top, the royal family next, the aristocracy a small step lower, and the rest of humanity below notice.
These conservatives formed a sizable group all over Europe; they could be found at the various courts, and in most government ministries, and they still owned much of the land. The reformers also disagreed with the Marquis de Sade. Although, of course, they advocated change, they believed in the importance of virtue, usually as expounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kindness to others, a yearning for the equality of mankind, a hefty dose of sentimentality, and a need to create a morally sound world motivated them.
On occasion that last need outweighed any possible kindness; it was in order to build a more equal society that the French revolutionaries sent a significant number of people to the guillotine. Perhaps because his fellowmen made him so uncomfortable, Rousseau had come up with a startling notion, that of the "noble savage. Only in a state of nature did mankind live virtuously; with organized societies came greed, tyranny, inequality, and afflictions of all kinds.
And so the very people who felt, with a degree of justification, that they had reached an unparalleled degree of civilization, also fantasized about life in a state of nature. This in no sense diminished their sense of superiority over the rest of the world.
Since no "noble savages" were actually known, and since, in any event, no one really intended to trade gilded carriages and sumptuous mansions for a cave, the yearning for a state of nature could be understood as a sign of sophistication that simply confirmed a well-understood fact: Europe was vastly superior to the rest of the world.
He was right. Throughout the eighteenth century, and culminating in the s and s, all across Europe, a new culture had been established in which pleasure was the key.
Naturally, there were all sorts of pleasures. Some could be found in a witty, far-ranging conversation; and so, before , people came from all over just to attend the Paris salons. Other enjoyments were more sensual, ranging from an appreciation of the nouvelle cuisine to the understanding of interior decoration: even today, the great furniture makers of that time remain unequaled.
And then, there had been other, even more compelling, ways to enjoy oneself. Men and women alike had felt free to love whom they chose; fidelity to a spouse was considered stodgy; and kept women had flourished. Here, in fact, choice had been everywhere, even if not many hosts went to the same lengths as one particular Neapolitan prince. Depending on his guests' preferences, they were greeted by ravishing young women or handsome young men—or both—standing naked around a pool and ready to do whatever the guests wanted.
That had been a time when refinement was everything. Manners, tastes, sensibilities, everything seemed to reject crudeness. As for sentimentality, it was everywhere. When, in , Marie Antoinette was spotted sitting in the Garden of the Tuileries eating strawberries and cream, all the spectators burst into tears at her adorable simplicity. If your little dog had the sniffles, you announced to all your friends that your anguish was excruciating, and that, indeed, you would not sleep a wink that night.
There might still be a few local wars, but they would be minor and conducted with becoming humanness. There could be no great social upheaval: change would come gradually and without tears. Of course, not all Europeans thought alike. The English aristocracy might love visiting Paris; it might think the French set the right standards when it came to culture, decor, and food; but the British government prided itself on its unique way of operating, and it was intent on securing trading posts around the world, an activity the French found deeply uninteresting.
France had wanted no more conquests; Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, had been eager to expand her already enormous realm, and in order to do so, she had appropriated about half of Poland the other half was split between Austria and Prussia and a great swatch of territory in the Caucasus and along the Black Sea. Still, in the s, the Europeans, for all their differences, had shared some certainties.
Chief of them was that, in this most civilized, most superior continent, violent change was unthinkable. This wholly mistaken belief had survived for an amazingly long time. When, in , the Revolution began in France with the election of the Estates-General, everyone except a few die-hard reactionaries felt sure that this was the first step in a process of peaceful reform.
When, on July 14 of that year, the Parisians stormed and took the Bastille, it was seen as a positive step, even though it had involved the odd lynching, what mattered, though, was the final end of arbitrary government. Not to worry, well-informed people said, the Revolution was now over. And they repeated that statement when, on October 4, a mob dragged the king, the queen, and the royal family from Versailles back to Paris.
Of course, they were wrong; these events were merely the beginning of astonishingly violent and radical changes. Within three years, the monarchy had ended, the new constitution had been discarded, and massacres had taken place in the Paris prisons. In September , the Republic was proclaimed. A new revolutionary government took over, and the Terror began. France, that most refined, that most sophisticated of countries, had become unrecognizable.
The officially proclaimed Terror was, however, no random savagery. The approximately ten thousand men and women who were killed were selected quite carefully: if the new national assembly, the Convention, demanded such bloodthirsty policies, if its all-powerful committees sent cartfuls of aristocrats, priests, and assorted opponents to the guillotine, it was, they considered, for a good reason, and no one was more coldly logical, or more blood-chillingly threatening, than Robespierre.
The Republic, he explained, was the hope of mankind; if it disappeared, tyranny would prevail forever; thus, in order to preserve liberty, it was necessary to suppress it temporarily. That line of reasoning, for all its self-evident fallacy, has continued to have enormous appeal.
The Soviets used it in our own century, and so do dictators all over the world. The threat from outside also helped to sustain the Terror. France was at war with Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain, and they had all announced that they would restore the monarchy when they won.
Many excesses, therefore, were passed off as needed for the defense of the Republic. By , everybody understood that this was no longer a possibility, but between and , France was in real danger. It should, by all normal standards, have been defeated; briefly, it even looked as if it would be. Just how wars were won, after all, seemed very clear: the side with the most powerful allies, the best officer corps, the greater firepower, and the best drilled troops obviously could not lose.
The French army, by those standards, was woefully inferior: it had no allies; it was grievously undersupplied; the men were raw recruits; and most of the officers had emigrated because they were aristocrats who hated the Republic. The Allies, therefore, expected to win quickly and easily.
Then, having occupied Paris and shot a good many people, they would restore the monarchy, help themselves to some territory, and go home triumphant. In fret, to their horror, precisely the opposite happened. In part because so many of the French now felt the country really belonged to them, in part because the economy was ruthlessly regulated so as to produce the necessary resources, the revolutionary army went on to win battle after battle.
By the beginning of , it had conquered the Austrian Netherlands today's Belgium and Holland, much of the left bank of the Rhine, and much of northern Italy. And while it was at it, it invented modern warfare.
The most important of these innovations was the adoption of universal conscription. Until then, troops had been recruited in one of two ways: by offering boons upon enlistment, or simply by force. Now, in France, it was the entire nation or at least its young males that came together to form the army; and those soldiers were not only numerous, they were highly patriotic, and cheered on by most of their compatriots.
Thus, a relatively small professional army was replaced by the nation itself and, as a result, wars that, until then, had seemed mostly an aristocratic game had come to be supported by much of the population. There was still more. Until the Revolution, wars had been fought for precise, limited reasons: to defend a country's honor, or to conquer territory.
Having themselves become free, they announced, they would bring liberty with them wherever they conquered. Indeed, they said, they were in conflict only with the kings, not with the peoples, who were themselves oppressed and thus the natural allies of France; and French armies came, therefore, not to gain new provinces, but to spread the benefits of freedom and a republican form of government.
War had thus become not just unavoidable but, seemingly, the normal state of things. Years passed, and the war continued. The format of the three-volume novel led to certain generic conventions influencing areas such as characterization, plot, and style, which remained until the format was abolished in Smith, largely controlled the distribution of literature, they often exerted an informal censorship on literature which some authors, such as George Moore, advocated against.
Class and Poverty in Southern Literature. The South has generated a unique set of myths, which are often at odds with the dominant Puritan-bred tales of American exceptionalism. If the North had to downplay vertical visions of the social, class stratifications have always been recognized more readily in the Southern regions. Rather than disentangling race from class, however, these categories were seen as closely connected in the antebellum slave-holding South.
Even after the end of slavery, class was never solely an economic category; surprisingly close to notions of caste, class dynamics came fully entrenched with cultural distinctions, which more often than not were cast in the language of blood ties—the rhetoric of race. As a result, strong values were attributed to these distinctions. And although the North, too, assessed the rich and the poor in the stern moral vocabulary, the influence of pseudo-scientific Eugenics studies and other factors added a new dimension to this moralizing of the hierarchic order in the South.
This had repercussions on the way the poor were perceived. The allegedly chivalrous planter aristocracy at the top found their counterpart at the low end of the stratum in a form of abject poverty. Some poor whites were located just a notch above the black citizenry whose exclusion dramatically exceeded went beyond economic hardship. It proved to be a proximity structuring the cultural imaginary to come. Often, it was complicit in maintaining the biases of this peculiar culture of poverty, by revitalizing the stock of stereotypes of poor whites, or by downplaying the terror of the plantations and naturalizing the hierarchies between the classes.
At times, it also subverted the household representations and created ambiguous tales of class and life in poverty; at others, writers aimed at a more truthful account, or tried to tell tales of solidarity. The literary history of white poverty is only the most consistent tale to be told when it comes to Southern writing. While not unrelated, another tradition has come to the fore when African American writers were able to create and publish their own accounts of black life. Ever since Jim Crow laws created a black underclass in the Reconstruction period, depictions of their life experiences included economic hardships as well.
Tied to different genres and poetological interests, black writers engaged in a reflection of the twin exclusions of race and class. Finally, in the so-called Postsouth era, the literature of poverty has been rejuvenated by a more self-reflexive aesthetics that moves beyond the earlier concerns of Southern literature.
Close Reading. Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Cognate traditions of exegesis and commentary formed around Roman law and the canon law of the Christian Church, and they also find expression in the long tradition of Chinese historical commentaries and exegeses on the Five Classics and Four Books.
As these practices developed in the West, they were adapted to medieval and early modern literary texts from which the early manifestations of modern secular literary analysis came into being in European and American universities. Close reading comprises the methodologies at the center of literary scholarship as it developed in the modern academy over the past one hundred years or so, and has come to define a central set of practices that dominated scholarly work in English departments until the turn to literary and critical theory in the late s.
This article provides an overview of these dominant forms of close reading in the modern Western academy. The focus rests upon close reading practices and their codification in English departments, although reference is made to non-Western reading practices and philological traditions, as well as to significant nonanglophone alternatives to the common understanding of literary close reading.
Colonial Australian Gothic Literature. Frontier colonial Gothic literature in Australia gives expression to the experience and aftermath of violent encounters between settlers and Indigenous people on the frontier. Colonial development distances the Gothic from the frontier, to which it returns in belated and spectral ways. Clarke also provides examples of convict Gothic literature in colonial Australia, in particular with the serialization of His Natural Life — Copyright and the Commodification of Authorship in 18th- and 19th-Century Europe.
The modern concept of authorship evolved in parallel with the legal recognition of the author as the subject of certain property rights within the marketplace for books. Such a market was initially regulated by a system of printing privileges, which was replaced by copyright laws at the juncture of the 18th and 19th centuries. The inclusion of copyright under the umbrella of property and the dominating economic discourse marked the naissance of a new figure of the author, namely, the author as supplier of intellectual labor to the benefit of society at large.
In this sense, products of authorship became fully fledged commodities to be exchanged in the global marketplace. Focusing on the transition between the privilege and the copyright systems, and the prevailing economic rationale for the protection of works of authorship, leads to a more original understanding of authorship as rooted in the human need for reciprocal communication for the sake of truth.
Miranda, Francisco de. In the Viaje por los Estados Unidos, —, translated as The New Democracy in America: Travels of Francisco de Miranda in the United States, —, Miranda articulates a hemispheric consciousness that anticipates the impact of Latino immigration in the American story, turning it into a North—South narrative, as well recent developments in American studies. At the same time, he opens a space for sovereignty in Latin America. Through his experiences in the United States, Miranda confronts the limits of a democracy predicated on exclusionary categories of race, gender, and class.
Finally, Miranda can be considered an early exponent of Romanticism in the Hispanophone world in his engagement with the historical sublime and his construction of an autobiographical subject who is conscious of being a historical agent. Domesticity in Victorian Literature. When Victorian writers talked about the home, they invoked a range of contested ideas and complex affects about the material and imagined space where self and society meet.
0コメント