Eighteenth-Century London: Urban Paradise or Fallen City?

Weitzman, Arthur J.

doi:10.2307/2708657

Cited by 43 publications

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“…Il est difficile de dire ce que le public pouvait bien faire de ces vues si diamétralement opposées de Londres, largement disponibles sous la forme de reproductions. Elles soulignent le rôle joué par la représentation et l'image, qui sont souvent d'un caractère contradictoire et qui sont librement accessibles par l'intermédiaire de la presse commerciale, dans la définition et la diffusion des perceptions publiques de la capitale 56 . Cela suggère une conscience collective hautement réflexive et intensément tournée vers elle-même, et qui n'était peut-être pas seulement désireuse mais aussi soucieuse de négocier et de jongler avec des images conflictuelles 57 .…”

Section: Une Culture De La Représentationunclassified

Pouvoir et culture au sein de la métropole des Lumières : les Îles britanniques 1660-1800

Borsay¹

2005

Histoire Urbaine

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Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Société française d'histoire urbaine. © Société française d'histoire urbaine. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

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Section: Une Culture De La Représentationunclassified

Pouvoir et culture au sein de la métropole des Lumières : les Îles britanniques 1660-1800

Borsay¹

2005

Histoire Urbaine

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“…Encoding significations ranging from a glorious urban ideal of intellectual and commercial thriving (for authors like Addison, Boswell, Johnson, Dryden or Voltaire) to the scatological vision so pervasive in Augustan satire, the literary representations of London reflect the "schizoid character of urban personality," its ambivalent movement between greater sociability and an increasingly manifest need for privacy. 13 The invasion of the polite world by Pope's dunces, their spatial appropriation of the West End and apocalyptical "restoration" of a chaotic modernity is but a metaphorical terminus point of a literary obsession live in London's cultural memory for almost a century. 14 Conceived at a time when the new capitalist developments started to assign certain functions to certain spaces, The Dunciad's fascination with topography has been seen as a symptom of the social confusion caused by rapid urbanization, as an effort to append meaning to a constantly changing spatial environment.…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian Days of Lead and Gold. (The Dunciad in Four Books, IV, [13][14][15][16] Published twelve years after the first edition of The Dunciad and only two before Pope's death, the fourth book brings with it a new hero and significant spatial enhancement: Cibber replaces Theobald as the king of the dunces and the poem encompasses the "whole polite world" attacking "all Imposition either Literary, Moral or Political" with "General, not particular Satire." 48 The change in method is striking, the detachment from the minute particularity of the first three books programmatic, and the result, indeed, heterogeneous.…”

Section: Book IV Vacuous Spaces: the Solar System Of The Dullmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces, Things, Heterotoplas: A Duncical Map Of Early Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Baird¹

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My work sets The Dunciad in Four Books (1743) into parallel play with the most recent technologies of digital humanities, drawing on historical, theoretical and quantitative methods to shed a new light on publicness as an emerging category at the beginning of the eighteenth century. My project branches out in three main directions. First, I attempt to map out the London of Pope's time, to recover its various topographical, political, religious, and cultural spaces, based on the unusually rich system of allusions which informs the text. This layered reading of the text accounts for Pope's unique overlapping of real, mythological and imaginary spaces which contributes to the creation of a networked text and reading community, so characteristic for a modern urban setting. Second, I use this layered reading of the text to argue that Pope's intention was to create a "heterotopic" space describing what British culture might have become under the Moderns' assault. Such an exploration of the possible opens a cultural field usually not surveyed by current criticism: the contribution made by minor or forgotten authors in shaping the cultural milieu of their time. Finally, I pay particular attention to the textual spaces described by the poem and its overflowing apparatus. I read Pope's textual strategy of constantly referencing his poem in footnotes as an instance of non-sequential writing, a writing that is rhizomatic, branching and hypertextual in nature, and which encourages new reading strategies that can be best brought to light through the use of digital technologies. Even as I appear to oppose Pope's agenda, I defend here the fundamental, but little acknowledged, role played by Pope's "dunces" in shaping the main directions of modernity. obtaining it. In the summer of 2011, a Dissertation Seminar in the Humanities funded by the Mellon Foundation allowed me to share my work and ideas with fellow dissertators from various departments under the superb mentorship of John Lyons, whom I will always remember as a model of intellectual involvement and support. Last but not least, I owe a special thanks to David Vander Meulen, who promptly and generously helped me at various stages of this project with his invaluable expertise on Pope's text. I feel very fortunate to have been part of an intellectual community whose standard of excellence is a hallmark of our university as a whole.

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Poetry and the City

Ellis¹

2007

A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

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Eighteenth-Century London: Urban Paradise or Fallen City?

Cited by 43 publications

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Pouvoir et culture au sein de la métropole des Lumières : les Îles britanniques 1660-1800

Pouvoir et culture au sein de la métropole des Lumières : les Îles britanniques 1660-1800

Spaces, Things, Heterotoplas: A Duncical Map Of Early Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Poetry and the City

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