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Rachael King - Book of Improvement, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2027

Book of Improvement

Media Landscapes in the Global Enlightenment

Av Rachael King

Del i serien Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History

551 kr

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Beskrivning
How the concept of improvement came to dominate and direct British thinking about social change during the eighteenth centuryImprovement had a specific environmental meaning during the eighteenth century, referring primarily to the development of land. Its application, however, grew to encompass almost every arena of social life: agriculture, trade, infrastructure, morality, literature, language, the law, the arts, the sciences, the self. Rather than understanding improvement as a set of ideas, Rachael King shows for the first time how the concept developed in and through new forms of early interactive media, such as before-and-after flaps, printed diaries, and magazines and periodicals.While we now understand improvement as generally “making things better,” the idea played a key role in colonial, racist, sexist, and classist undertakings in the period, as colonized peoples, the enslaved, women, and the working classes were sometimes forcibly “improved.” Drawing on extensive archival research and bringing together methodologies of media studies, literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the digital humanities, King shows how certain genres of writing elicit a level of interaction that blurs the boundaries of the book, enabling the transformation of an idea into a cultural keyword.
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Rachael King is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures.

Recensioner i media

“King excavates a basic but elusive concept—improvement—nearly lost to givenness. The resulting book is a tour-de-force work of cultural criticism that explains how and why we seek the history of ideas, and a landmark contribution to the humanities.”—David Alff, SUNY-Buffalo“An elegant and persuasive meditation on improvement’s relationship with the rich variety of eighteenth-century print, The Book of Improvement will quickly become essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment’s trickiest term.”—Jon Mee, author of Networks of Improvement“Rachael King’s immersive, nuanced, multi-media survey refuses to take an 18th-century buzzword--improvement--at face value.  Her methodologically daring study weighs improvement's sometimes regressive politics against the innovative means of its production.  It will not be improved upon any time soon.”—Jayne Lewis, author of Air's Appearance: Literary Fiction and the Rise of Atmosphere, 1660-1794“In an extraordinarily supple reading of the Enlightenment concept of improvement, King brilliantly marshals multiple methods and approaches to conceptual history as she convincingly demonstrates that material texts have effects on and in the world.”—Peter de Bolla, author of The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights“The Book of Improvement is a landmark study. Learned and capacious, it offers a definitive and satisfyingly non-linear history of one of the most important and politically freighted concepts of the eighteenth century and our present moment and demonstrates the role of the book in its making and contestation.”—Jennie Batchelor, University of York

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