Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was a sudden transformation, says Dror Wahrman, and nothing short of a revolution in the understanding of selfhood and of identity categories including race, gender, and class. In this pathbreaking book, he offers a fundamentally new interpretation of this critical turning point in Western history. Wahrman demonstrates this transformation with a fascinating variety of cultural evidence from eighteenth-century England, from theater to beekeeping, fashion to philosophy, art...
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was a sudden transformation, say...
In this vanguard collection, a stellar group of internationally known scholars explores a key period in the making of the modern West. Although the long-standing notion of "dual revolutions," economic in Britain and political in France, has been vigorously challenged in recent years, these authors find that "revolutionary" is an apt description of the important cultural transformations that took place in both France and Britain at the onset of modernity. The essays, by social and cultural historians as well as by literary scholars, range over many critical themes within this...
In this vanguard collection, a stellar group of internationally known scholars explores a key period in the making of the modern West. Although the lo...
This book explores the origins of the influential view of modern society that places a "middle class" at its center, as it developed in Britain during the so-called "Industrial Revolution." Using a wider variety of sources and closer methods of textual analysis than previous studies of languages of class, the author develops a nuanced model for the interplay of social reality and social language. He demonstrates that a "middle class"-based language of social description did not simply reflect changes in social structure, but was rather the outcome of political circumstances in a period of...
This book explores the origins of the influential view of modern society that places a "middle class" at its center, as it developed in Britain during...
This book explores the origins of the influential view of modern society that places a "middle class" at its center, as it developed in Britain during the so-called "Industrial Revolution." Using a wider variety of sources and closer methods of textual analysis than previous studies of languages of class, the author develops a nuanced model for the interplay of social reality and social language. He demonstrates that a "middle class"-based language of social description did not simply reflect changes in social structure, but was rather the outcome of political circumstances in a period of...
This book explores the origins of the influential view of modern society that places a "middle class" at its center, as it developed in Britain during...
Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems--natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others--whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world's disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect--but with them also a new...
Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems--natural, social, politic...
