Representing Humanity in the Age of Enlightenment

by Alexander Cook

Overview

The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned with what it meant to be human. This collection of essays traces the concept of ‘humanity’ through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848933736
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Series:	The Enlightenment World
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alexander Cook is a specialist in eighteenth-century cultural history based in the School of History at the Australian National University. He is co-editor of History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association. He has published in Intellectual History Review, History Workshop Journal, Criticism and Sexualities. He is currently completing a monograph on the French philosopher, historian and revolutionary Constantin-François Volney., Ned Curthoys is a research fellow in English in the School of Cultural Inquiry at the Australian National University. His publications include the co-edited Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public-Intellectual (2007) and The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation (2013)., Shino Konishi is a fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She is the author of The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012), and the editor of Aboriginal History.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Science and Politics of Humanity in the Eighteenth Century: an Introduction, Alexander Cook, Ned Curthoys, Shino Konishi; Chapter 1 Representing Humanity During the French Revolution: Volney’s ‘General Assembly of Peoples’, Alexander Cook; Chapter 2 Representing Woman: Historicizing Women in the age of Enlightenment, Mary Spongberg; Chapter 3 Sheer Folly and Derangement: How the Crusades Disoriented Enlightenment Historiography, John Docker; Chapter 4 Turning Things Around Together: Enlightenment and Conversation, Jon Mee; Chapter 5 Moses Mendelssohn and the Character of Virtue, Ned Curthoys; Chapter 6 Songs From the Edge of the World: Enlightenment Perceptions of Khoikhoi and Bushmen Music, Vanessa Agnew; Chapter 7 Joshua Reynolds and the Problem of Human Difference, Kate Fullagar; Chapter 8 François Péron’s Meditation on Death, Humanity and Savage Society, Shino Konishi; Chapter 9 Neither Civilized Nor Savage: the Aborigines of Colonial Port Jackson, Through French Eyes, 1802, Nicole Starbuck; Chapter 10 The Difficulty of Becoming a Civilized Human: Orientalism, Gender and Sociability in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Hsu-Ming Teo; Chapter 11 Fictions of Human Community, Jonathan Lamb; Chapter 12 Fairy-Tale Humanity in French Libertine Fiction of the Mid-Eighteenth Century, Peter Cryle; Chapter 13 Philosophical Anthropology and the Sadean ‘System’; or, Sade and the Question of Enlightenment Humanism, Henry Martyn Lloyd;