This paper aims to analyse the interactions of space, mobility, and power in the history of early American clubs, through the study of a specific institution exported from Britain to its colonies. Indissolubly linked to urbanisation, commercial growth and the expansion of the press, club sociability perfectly answered people’s need for social integration, sharing cultural values...
A sheer impossibility of the epistolary novel, silence is nevertheless thematized in Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). Clarissa’s silences are multifarious, affecting both internal and external communication, both the represented conversations and the correspondence itself. This paper presents a typology of the various silences at work in Samuel Richardson’s second novel. It...
The Man in the Moon was the only royalist mercury to come to life after the regicide in 1649 while other royalist newsbooks had either disappeared from the market or were briefly revived. It has variously been labelled as “smutty,” “obscene,” as well as “reactionary and popular,” providing an example of “uninformative and pornographic journalism.” Precisely, John Crouch, who was...
The charge of scepticism was already brought against Locke by one of his contemporaries: Bishop Stillingfleet criticized the limited range and certainty guaranteed to knowledge by the “new way of ideas” formulated in Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. In his response to the bishop, Locke disclaimed scepticism as incompatible with a sincere love for truth and he denied validity...
In the English Renaissance, the Petrarchan lover was the figure of excess par excellence. In poems and plays of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, his excessive desire and grief were expressed through a rhetoric characterised by a systematic resort to set devices and a repeated use of Petrarchan commonplaces. This has led to a certain misconception of Petrarchism in...
Anger is an excessive passion in the early modern period, both in most treatises on the passions and in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. This article examines the representations of anger and the contradiction of a passion which is both admired when it is the excessive outburst of a great hero such as Achilles, and condemned because it is seen as violent, uncontrollable and...
Peter Lely’s The Concert (late 1640s) pictures a bucolic concert scene set in a glade, where a violist and a flautist seem to entertain four women standing and sitting in front of artistically hung draperies. Although the salient presence of the bass violin suggests this picture does represent a concert, the careful spectator cannot help but notice that its inner harmony is not...
Gouverneur Morris landed in Le Havre in late January 1789. He had just completed the challenging task of drafting the American Constitution that was to secure the future of the Young Nation and thus emerged as one of the Founding Fathers. He arrived in France with mixed views of the country and its inhabitants. His Diary is replete with references to and criticisms of a people...
As the American colonies announced their political break from the Mother Country in 1776, France was getting ready to offer the insurgents a military and economic cooperation. American merchants were at the core of these newly developed networks, and by travelling to France, were able to rethink their stereotyped vision, strengthen exchanges, and define their national identity...
The idea of commitment is central to the American novels of the post-Revolutionary era, as it functions as a model for individual and collective behavior that carries strong moral, social, as well as political resonances. While the capacity to fully devote oneself to another, particularly to a supreme being or institution such as one’s nation, is praised in these texts, one can...