Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital : Luxury, Virtue and the Senses in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Paperback / softback Book

Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital : Luxury, Virtue and the Senses in Eighteenth-Century Culture Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

This book charts the complex ideological territory of eighteenth-century sentimental discourse through the uniquely revealing lens of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes.

The establishment of the London Magdalen House in 1758 is read as the cultural high watermark of sentimental confidence in the compatibility of virtue and commerce.

It is the product of a whiggish, moral-sense discourse at its most ebullient and culturally authoritative.

Equally visible, though, in this context, are the ideological limitations of moral-sense thinking and an anticipation of the ways in which its ideas ultimately failed to underwrite commercial virtue.

Sentimental discourse fractures in the course of the mid-century: in part it becomes increasingly divorced from the world; retreating into a primitivist, proto-Romantic virtue which claims no purchase on "things as they are." Where sentimental vocabulary persists in a worldly context, it becomes divorced from a vocabulary of moral virtue.

It is overlaid with a French usage where "sentiment" and "sensibility" describe exquisite emotion rather than refined and cultivated virtue.' Changing Sentiments and the Magdalen Hospital registers the fracturing and shifting ground of sentimental discourse in the changing institutional practise of the Magdalen institution, most particularly in its increasingly embrace of evangelical religion.

Information

Other Formats

£38.99

Out of stock
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information