This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two strands of interest are explored by the individual authors. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist's physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Through a consideration of the material formation of concepts, this book explores questions that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, and designed forms. In doing so, it introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.

Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. This study calls attention to a series of powerful engagements by Spaniards with Milton’s works and legend, following a general chronology from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, tracing the overall story of Milton’s presence from indices of prohibited works during the Inquisition, through the many Spanish translations of Paradise Lost, to the author’s depiction on stage in the nineteenth-century play Milton, and finally to the representation of Paradise Lost by Spanish visual artists.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic satire grew in visual risk-taking, while paper money became a more standard carrier of financial value, courting controversy as a medium, moral problem, and factor in inflation. Through analysis of satirical prints, as well as case studies of monetary satires beyond London, this book demonstrates several key ways that cultures attach value to printed paper, accepting it as social reality and institutional fact. Thus, satirical banknotes were objects that broke down the distinction between paper money and graphic satire ​altogether.