2,035 research outputs found
Ros Ballaster : Seductive Forms. Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. 1992
No full textDucrocq Jean. Ros Ballaster : Seductive Forms. Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. 1992. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°25, 1993. L'Europe des Lumières. p. 626
The Eastern Tale and the Candid Reader: Tristram Shandy, Candide, Rasselas
No full textVoltaire’s Candide, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and the first two volumes of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759. All three works pursue an agenda of practical scepticism. Textual allusions to the Mille et une Nuit inform the ambivalent pursuit of sceptical reading in these works. Uncovering this hitherto unacknowledged shared source in the Arabian Nights adds new support for readings of these works as critiques of the “ lunacy” of the Seven Years War.En 1759 parurent Candide, Rasselas et les deux premiers volumes de
Tristram Shandy, trois oeuvres marquées d’un même scepticisme, scepticisme auquel contribuent des allusions textuelles aux Mille et une nuits. Cette source commune, jusqu’alors non repérée, appuie le type de lecture qui voit dans ces trois oeuvres une critique de la folie de la guerre de Sept Ans.Ballaster Ros. The Eastern Tale and the Candid Reader: Tristram Shandy, Candide, Rasselas. In: XVII-XVIII. Revue de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. N°67, 2010. L’attrait de l’Orient / The Call of the East. pp. 109-125
Eighteenth-century women writers and the tradition of epistolary complaint
No full textThis thesis considers the presence of the epistolary tradition of female complaint in the writings of five late eighteenth-century women writers: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, and Frances Burney D’Arblay. The epistolary female complaint tradition is premised on the suggestion that readers are permitted, through the literary endeavours of male authors/transcribers, a glimpse into the authentically felt woes of women; the writers in this study both question and exploit this expectation. Often viewed by critics like John Kerrigan as a tradition that stifled female creativity, epistolary female complaint proves, this thesis argues, a lively and enlivening tradition for women writers; it provided opportunities for literary experimentation and enabled them to turn their experiences into artistic form. Five themes central to the epistolary female complaint tradition are considered: betrayal, absence, suicide, falls, and authorship. Each chapter looks at one theme and one author specifically. Chapter 1 examines the narrative of betrayal Hester Thrale Piozzi established in her journals from 1764 to 1784. Chapter 2 turns to Mary Wollstonecraft and her accounts of absence in her private letters to Gilbert Imlay, and her epistolary travel account, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Chapter 3 discusses Charlotte Turner Smith’s engagement with the theme of suicide in her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and her epistolary novel, Desmond(1792). Chapter 4 considers the strategies employed in Mary Robinson’s autobiographical, poetic, and fictional writings, which work to move beyond the moral fall the tradition implied. Chapter 5 focuses on the recurrent theme of authorial debt in Frances Burney D’Arblay’s journals, plays, and fiction. I conclude by considering Jane Austen’s appropriation of the tradition in her final novel, Persuasion (1818), and her transformation of the tradition by providing a resolution to the cause of complaint
Towards an open-source social middleware for humanoid robots
No full text09.12.13 KB. Ok to add author version to spiral.Recent examples of robotics middleware including YARP, ROS, and NaoQi, have greatly enhanced the standardisation, interoperability and rapid development of robotics application software. In this paper, we present our research towards an open source middleware to support the development of social robotic applications. In the core of the ability of a robot to interact socially are algorithms to perceive the actions and intentions of a human user. We attempt to provide a computational layer to standardise these algorithms utilising a bioinspired computational architecture known as HAMMER (Hierarchical Attentive Multiple Models for Execution and Recognition) and demonstrate the deployment of such layer on two different humanoid platforms, the Nao and iCub robots. We use a dance interaction scenario to demonstrate the utility of the framework
Made in the media: actresses, celebrity and the periodical press in the late eighteenth century
No full textThis thesis examines the periodical culture that operated in late eighteenth-century Britain (predominantly though not exclusively in London) and the ways in which it made the female âstarsâ of the stage. I propose that actressesâ celebrity was in part made in the media; the press coverage they received has not had the same attention as their treatment through other media, such as the memoir or portraiture. Through a combination of literary and cultural analysis, this thesis examines the âmedia textsâ that circulated in the periodical press about three contemporaneous actresses: Sarah Siddons, Elizabeth Farren and Mary Wells.
Three central questions drive this thesis. What role did the periodical press play in the
development of actressesâ celebrity in the late eighteenth century? What rhetorical strategies were used in the newspapers to represent actressesâ public identities and how did these verbal images correspond with other media? How did readers and subjects engage with news media as a shared space for shaping celebrity identities?
In exploring answers to these questions this work aims to contribute to the ongoing reevaluation of the centrality of media in early celebrity and to an understanding of the daily, weekly and monthly circulation of motifs that created and sustained celebrity identities. It also makes the case that an emergent celebrity culture in this period was shaped in and through an exploration of gendered (female) performance and the limits of its agency.
Part I describes the media landscape in relation to the stage. Chapter 1 describes the ways in which the stage represented newspapers and their reception. Chapter 2 turns to the ways in which newspapers represented the stage. Part II offers case studies. Chapter 3 argues that the press treated ambivalently Sarah Siddonsâs background as a stroller. Chapter 4 focuses on the kind of âcreditâ newspapers accorded Elizabeth Farrenâs portrayal of the character of the âladyâ on and off stage. And Chapter 5 demonstrates that, despite her close association with newspapers, Mary Wells failed to secure the kind of celebrity she craved through the press.</p
“Easy moveables”: life-writing, the thief, and the circulation of objects in eighteenth-century Britain, 1724-1774
No full textThis thesis argues that the representation of male thieves in eighteenth-century criminal life-writing is shaped by their relationship with objects, and shaped differently according to the nature of those objects. In spite of its formulaic, lowbrow and often uninspired characteristics, criminal literature proves in this respect a prime site for literary experimentation. Texts about criminals occupy a liminal space between high and low culture, a position mirrored by that of the criminals themselves and the objects they steal, as they circulate at the margins of legal society. The thieves' own hybridity is translated in the genres adopted by their biographers, ranging from poorly-written journalistic prose, more or less edifying sermons, to a plethora of literary forms such as plays or even epistolary fiction. The prevalence of objects as drivers of narrative affects every aspect of the criminal’s life, and invites investigation of matters of belonging, copyright, domesticity, gentility, and masculinity. Defined by their refusal, or inability, to conform with socially acceptable behaviours and occupation, thieves depend on their mastery of objects and the significations of those objects to succeed, whether in making a profit or evading arrest and execution. In accounts of thieves' lives, conversely, objects become animated and acquire a life of their own, dominating the narrative and representation, so that thieves themselves are in turn transformed into things, or manipulated into new functions. The thief’s relationship to objects varies in terms of both his own mobility and that of the objects he steals and fences. Hence, the thesis falls into two separate parts; the first considers London footpads and housebreakers, while the second is focused on highwaymen. While the London criminal circles might be seen as forming parallel dysfunctional underworld societies, highwaymen are more often treated as solitary itinerants at most in social relationship with an accomplice or a horse. I do not discuss female criminality except in so far as it plays a part in the biographies of the male felons examined here, as life-writing centred around criminal women focuses mostly on their illicit sexual practices rather than their relationship with the material world. An introductory chapter situates the analysis in relation to social, legal, and literary norms and conventions of the period as well as recent departures in critical thinking relevant to this thesis, such as thing theory and histories of material culture. Each subject chapter then investigates closely the distinctive and often carefully distinguished nature of an individual’s relationship with objects in the numerous publications that narrate his life. The first part of this thesis focuses on a London criminal underworld circle of the beginning of the century, each chapter dealing with one criminal figure in a group centred around the best known of them: Jonathan Wild. The first chapter is dedicated to footpad and housebreaker Joseph Blake, alias Blueskin (1700-1724), and his evolution from violent thug to picaresque figure. The next chapter follows escapist John Sheppard (1702-1724) and his struggle against material indicators of repressive legal power. The third chapter focuses on famed thief-taker and gang leader Jonathan Wild (1683-1725) and his peculiar position within eighteenth-century economic, criminal, and literary markets through his relationship with the material world. The second part of the thesis is centred on socially and geographically mobile highwaymen. It begins with a discussion of Dick Turpin (1705-1739) and his recreation and corruption of domestic structures. The next chapter is dedicated to James Maclaine, the Gentleman Highwayman (1724-1750), famed for his performative gentility, in which we observe character represented as possession. Finally, the last chapter focuses on John Rann, alias Sixteen-Strings Jack (ca1750-1774), and explores the representations of his sartorial choices in the context of popular gentility and masculinity
Familiar collaboration and women writers in eighteenth-century Britain: Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding and Susannah and Margaret Minifie
No full textBetween 1740 and 1770, a number of women writers choose to make explicit in their printed texts their collaboration with a ‘familiar’: a family member or close friend. In so doing, they strategically enact their personal relationships through the medium of print in order to claim for themselves a level of literary power and delineate the terms on which they entered the marketplace as authors. This thesis argues that familiar relations expressed along a horizontal axis – those of husband, wife, brother, sister and friend – offer a relatively flexible model of familiar relations in which women could acquire a level of agency in self-definition, supported by ideologies that valued women’s contribution to the polite sphere of sociable conversation. It demonstrates that Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Susannah and Margaret Minifie not only engage in collaborative literary production that is thoroughly inflected with the pressures of their historical context but that through familiar collaboration women writers display their professional authorial personae and generate social and literary criticism. Through close readings of carefully selected collaborative texts in the corpus of each writer, including the material history of the texts themselves, and the relationships expressed through those texts, this thesis highlights the complexity with which family relations interacted with print culture in the period. Far from using the familiar relation as a means of modestly retiring to the domestic sphere these women writers used their familiar relations as a basis from which to launch, describe and defend their authorial careers
The Economics of Ethical Conversation: The Commerce of the Letter in Eliza Haywood and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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