Adam Smith’s often overlooked “Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Call... more Adam Smith’s often overlooked “Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts” (1795) reveals his innovative understanding of the overlaps and conflicts in valuation in the emerging discourses of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and political economy. Placing his praise for an African performing a war-dance in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and representations of Africans (including Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative) clarifies current debates over the viability of liberal value and cultural pluralism in a post-Enlightenment world grappling with the implications of impeiralist violence, especially the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people.
Abstract:'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (... more Abstract:'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in Ramsay and texts from a seventeenth-century manual for colonising New Jersey to Burns's 'Is There For Honest Poverty' to the London Scottish regiment, this essay shows how Ramsay's remediation of a range of forms and practices – pastoral, Second Sight, songs, and proverbs – at once confirms and questions our models of Enlightenment within the terrain of an imperfectly United Kingdom.
Adam Smith’s often overlooked “Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Call... more Adam Smith’s often overlooked “Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts” (1795) reveals his innovative understanding of the overlaps and conflicts in valuation in the emerging discourses of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and political economy. Placing his praise for an African performing a war-dance in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and representations of Africans (including Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative) clarifies current debates over the viability of liberal value and cultural pluralism in a post-Enlightenment world grappling with the implications of impeiralist violence, especially the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people.
Abstract:'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (... more Abstract:'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in Ramsay and texts from a seventeenth-century manual for colonising New Jersey to Burns's 'Is There For Honest Poverty' to the London Scottish regiment, this essay shows how Ramsay's remediation of a range of forms and practices – pastoral, Second Sight, songs, and proverbs – at once confirms and questions our models of Enlightenment within the terrain of an imperfectly United Kingdom.
This is a review from the Fall 2017 issue of Eighreenth-Century Studies of Mike Hill and Warren M... more This is a review from the Fall 2017 issue of Eighreenth-Century Studies of Mike Hill and Warren Montag, _The Other Adam Smith_ (Stanford UP, 2014). This is a challenging, daring, and innovative book; although I raise some questions about approach and method, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Smith or in the intertwining of eighteenth-century philosophy and its historical moment.
Given the lucidity of Sandro Jung's book, it is not surprising that he makes it easy for the... more Given the lucidity of Sandro Jung's book, it is not surprising that he makes it easy for the reader to find its animating purpose: The expressed aim of this book is to change Mallet's historical and critical fate and read him againas his eighteenth century peers didas a man who ...
This is a review of Martha Redbone's excellent cd, published in _Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly... more This is a review of Martha Redbone's excellent cd, published in _Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly_ (Summer 2015)
Allan Ramsay is a re-mediator par excellence. He transforms a complex archive of Scottish forms... more Allan Ramsay is a re-mediator par excellence. He transforms a complex archive of Scottish forms and practices—from mock-elegy to Second Sight to songs and proverbs—into a wide-ranging body of work that seeks at once to preserve the specificity of Scotland in an Anglo-centric, post-Union world while also embracing, though not uncritically, a future marked by “improvement,” that master-term of the Enlightenment lexicon. In what follows, I want to trace how he does this by moving briefly through a few separate archives that speak to the composition and reception of The Gentle Shepherd and that point to larger questions about how archives are assembled and used and what we might mean by mediation and re-mediation.
N. B. Some of the images referred to in the talk do not appear in the text because permission to publish has not yet been obtained.
Uploads
Books by Steve Newman
Papers by Steve Newman
N. B. Some of the images referred to in the talk do not appear in the text because permission to publish has not yet been obtained.