Ausgehend von Faramerz Dabhoiwalas These der Existenz einer "ersten sexuellen Revolution" im 18. Jahrhundert enthält der Band Beiträge über die weibliche Tugendhaftigkeit in Luise Gottscheds "Panthea", die Sexualitätsproblematik in Lessings "Rettungen des Horaz", transkulturelle Sexualität bei Schnabel, Gellert und Willebrand, Geschlechterverhältnisse in Lessings frühen Lustspielen, Raum und Geschlecht in Lessings Familien-Dramen, die Disziplinierung sexuellen Verhaltens bei Rousseau und Wieland, die Thematisierung der Sexualität in englischen Übersetzungen von Goethes "Die Geschwister" und "Stella" sowie Casanovas sexuelle Geographie Europas.

This volume investigates the impact of the Radical Enlightenment on German culture during the eighteenth century, taking recent work by Jonathan Israel as its point of departure. The collection documents the cultural dimension of the debate on the Radical Enlightenment. In a series of readings of known and lesser-known fictional and essayistic texts, individual contributors show that these can be read not only as articulating a conflict between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, but also as documents of a debate about the precise nature of Enlightenment. At stake is the question whether the Enlightenment should aim to be an atheist, materialist, and political movement that wants to change society, or, in spite of its belief in rationality, should respect monarchy, aristocracy, and established religion. Contributors are: Mary Helen Dupree, Sean Franzel, Peter Höyng, John A. McCarthy, Monika Nenon, Carl Niekerk, Daniel Purdy, William Rasch, Ann Schmiesing, Paul S. Spalding, Gabriela Stoicea, Birgit Tautz, Andrew Weeks, Chunjie Zhang

The late-eighteenth century witnessed multiple Medeas take to the stages of Europe, in the Americas, and across the Russian empire. Performances took place in Moscow and São Paulo, in London and Lisbon, in Gotha, Stuttgart, and Venice. This lively collection of essays examines the various reasons why Medea, the ancient mother who killed her own children, attracted the attention of authors, audiences, actors, and rulers in Europe and its dominions during the pivotal period 1750 to 1800, and to what effects. As a migrant and iconoclast, Medea crosses a number of eighteenth-century borders: linguistic, cultural, national, temporal, spatial, aesthetic, ethical, and generic. Moreover, the fact that late-eighteenth-century playwrights, poets, composers, and choreographers all turned to one of the most problematic characters of Greco-Roman antiquity offers a unique opportunity to examine the remarkable flexibility of the reception process itself. Medea therefore functions as an intriguing case study, reflecting a wider context of cultural and political change within Europe and its colonies in the late-eighteenth century. By drawing together eighteenth-century specialists working across multiple languages and disciplines with the reception perspective of classical scholars, this volume brings much rare material from a range of archives across continental Europe to critical attention for the first time. Mapping Medea shows how the eighteenth century made Medea modern, and Medea helped to shape modern performance.

The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous—yet unacknowledged—conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings—often incestuously inclined—negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not quite same and not quite other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counterreactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

The theological implications of the philosophy of history, traced through the works of Buckhardt, Marx, Hegel, Proudhon, Comte, Condorcet, Turgot, Voltaire, Vico, Bossuet, Joachim, Augustine, Orosius and the Bible.

The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746) by Charles Batteux was arguably the most influential work on aesthetics published in the 18th century. James O. Young presents the first complete English translation of the work, with full annotations and a comprehensive introduction, which illuminate Batteux's continuing philosophical interest.

"Universal History" is a type of history that attempts to explain the world beyond the immediate surroundings of the author. It reflects a desire to synthesise the mass of written and oral knowledge about the past and to introduce a systematic interpretation. The purpose of this collection is to re-examine the notion of Universal Historiography with a focus on its appearance in the Greek and Roman world and on the legacy that ancient authors offered to later generations. Fifteen new essays by a diverse set of international scholars tackle questions of definition, and illustrate the diversity of its forms, structures, themes and analyses. The collection explores the historical and intellectual contexts which gave rise to universalist thought, and its reputation and reception in antiquity and beyond. This book will appeal to those interested in Graeco-Roman historiography, and those with an interest in the Arabic, Early Christian and modern reception of ancient historiography.

The French emigration was an exilic movement triggered by the 1789 French Revolution with long-lasting social, cultural, and political impacts that continued well into the nineteenth century. At times paradoxical, the political and legal implications of being an émigré are detangled in this edited collection, thus bringing to light unexpected processes of tensions and compromises between the exiles and their host societies. The refugee/host contact points also fostered a series of cultural transfers. This book argues that the French emigration ought to be seen within the broader context of an ‘Age of Exile’, a notion that better encompasses the dynamics of migration that forced many to re-imagine their relation to a nation and define their displaced identities. Revisiting the historiography of the last twenty years from an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume challenges pre-existing beliefs on the journeys and re-settlements – in Europe and beyond – of the French émigré community.

This volume examines East-West rhetoric in several different historical contexts, seeking to problematise its implicit assumptions and analyse its consequences.

This deeply informed book traces the dramatic history of early Soviet-western relations after World War I. Michael Jabara Carley provides a lively exploration of the formative years of Soviet foreign policy making after the Bolshevik Revolution, especially focusing on Soviet relations with the West during the 1920s. Carley demonstrates beyond doubt that this seminal period—termed the “silent conflict” by one Soviet diplomat—launched the Cold War. He shows that Soviet-western relations, at best grudging and mistrustful, were almost always hostile. Concentrating on the major western powers—Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States—the author also examines the ongoing political upheaval in China that began with the May Fourth Movement in 1919 as a critical influence on western-Soviet relations. Carley draws on twenty-five years of research in recently declassified Soviet and western archives to present an authoritative history of the foreign policy of the Soviet state. From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, deeply anti-communist western powers attempted to overthrow the newly formed Soviet government. As the weaker party, Soviet Russia waged war when it had to, but it preferred negotiations and agreements with the West rather than armed confrontation. Equally embattled by internal struggles for power after the death of V. I. Lenin, the Soviet government was torn between its revolutionary ideals and the pragmatic need to come to terms with its capitalist adversaries. The West too had its ideologues and pragmatists. This illuminating window into the overt and covert struggle and ultimate standoff between the USSR and the West during the 1920s will be invaluable for all readers interested in the formative years of the Cold War.