Refiguring Revolutions

Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution

Kevin Sharpe, Steven N. Zwicker

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520339118
• eBook ISBN: 9780520339125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Refiguring Revolutions presents an original and interdisciplinary reassessment of the cultural and political history of England from 1649 to 1789. Bypassing conventional chronologies and traditional notions of disciplinary divides, editors Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker frame a set of new agendas for, and suggest new approaches to, the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

Customary periodization by dynasty and century obscures the aesthetic and cultural histories that were enacted between and even by the English Civil Wars and the French Revolution. The authors of the essays in this volume set about returning aesthetics to the center of the master narrative of politics. They focus on topics and moments that illuminate the connection between aesthetic issues of a private or public nature and political culture. Politics between the Puritan Revolution and the Romantic Revolution, these authors argue, was a set of social and aesthetic practices, a narrative of presentations, exchanges, and performances as much as it was a story of monarchies and ministries.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• Introduction Refiguring Revolutions
• Republic and Monarchy
• “An Image Doting Rabble” The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England
• Queen Anne Makes Provision
• Sad Stories Louis XVI, George III, and the Language of Sentiment
• Reading and Writing
• Reading the Margins Politics and the Habits of Appropriation
• The Politics of Song in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
• Commerce and Society
• Performing the Passions in Commercial Society Bernard Mandeville and the Theatricality of Eighteenth-Century Thought
• “These Neuter Somethings” Gender Difference and Commercial Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England
• Body and Self
• Bathing and Baptism Sir John Floyer and the Politics of Cold Bathing
• Medicine, Politics, and the Body in Late Georgian England
• Nature and Culture
• A Natural Revolution? Garden Politics in Eighteenth-Century England
• The Pastoral Revolution
• NOTES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX