The Culture Of The Gift In Eighteenth Century England

Download or read book The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England written by C. Klekar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-01-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes the long overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts and cultural documents and provides innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.

Download or read book The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England written by Linda Zionkowski and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a variety of disciplinary perspectives, The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes the long-overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts, cultural documents, and economic relations in the period from 1660-1800. Contributors argue that the gift was instrumental to the workings of eighteenth-century society: it supported the phenomenal rise of charities, explained the increasingly complicated trade relations, enforced conventions of obligation and social hierarchies, and both strengthened and challenged the emergence of a market economy. Building upon the works of recent theorists, these essays provide innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.

Download or read book Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction written by Linda Zionkowski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

Download or read book The Birth of a Consumer Society written by Neil McKendrick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1982 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England written by David Porter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalized world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally. David Porter analyzes the processes by which Chinese aesthetic ideas were assimilated within English culture. Through case studies of individual figures, including William Hogarth and Horace Walpole, and broader reflections on cross-cultural interaction, Porter's readings develop new interpretations of eighteenth-century ideas of luxury, consumption, gender, taste and aesthetic nationalism. Illustrated with many examples of Chinese and Chinese-inspired objects and art, this is a major contribution to eighteenth-century cultural history and to the history of contact and exchange between China and the West.

Download or read book The Making of the Modern Self written by Dror Wahrman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wahrman argues that toward the end of the 18th century there was a radical change in notions of self & personal identity - a sudden transformation that was a revolution in the understanding of selfhood & of identity categories including race, gender, & class.

Download or read book Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England written by Catherine Ingrassia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporaneous development of speculative investment and the novel in the early eighteenth century, and women's role in both.