Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
Title | Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art PDF eBook |
Author | Sarah Cohen |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2021-02-11 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1350203602 |
How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters such as Chardin, as well as sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.
The Enlightened Animal in Eighteenth-century Art
Title | The Enlightened Animal in Eighteenth-century Art PDF eBook |
Author | Sarah R. Cohen |
Publisher | |
Pages | 256 |
Release | 2020 |
Genre | Animals |
ISBN | 9781350203617 |
"How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters such as Chardin, as well as sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettre, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice"--
The Enlightenment's Animals
Title | The Enlightenment's Animals PDF eBook |
Author | Nathaniel Wolloch |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2019 |
Genre | Animals and civilization |
ISBN | 9789462987623 |
This book gives an overview of attitudes toward animals in the long eighteenth century from an interdisciplinary perspective combining intellectual history and art history, and presents a new interpretation of changing attitudes toward animals during this period.
Fiction Without Humanity
Title | Fiction Without Humanity PDF eBook |
Author | Lynn Festa |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 364 |
Release | 2019-06-28 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0812251318 |
Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices— the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting— Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.
Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing
Title | Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-Century Liberal Political Writing PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Billing |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2023-12-07 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1003812481 |
Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers.
Animal Companions
Title | Animal Companions PDF eBook |
Author | Ingrid H. Tague |
Publisher | Animalibus |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | Human-animal relationships |
ISBN | 9780271065892 |
The material conditions of pet keeping -- Domesticating the exotic -- Fashioning the pet -- A privilege or a right? -- Pets and their people.
Artists and Amateurs
Title | Artists and Amateurs PDF eBook |
Author | Perrin Stein |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 247 |
Release | 2013-10-29 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0300197004 |
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2013-January 5, 2014.