This volume explores a pivotal period in European history, the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Politeness scholars have suggested that the nineteenth century heralds a significant transition in the meanings and realisations of politeness, between the Ancien Régime and the contemporary period, with the rise of the middle classes as economic, political, social and cultural actors. The central innovation of this volume consists in its use of a wide range of politeness metasources — grammar books, schoolbooks, conduct books, etiquette books, and letter-writing manuals — to access social norms. This interdisciplinary approach, which draws on historical linguistics, argumentation theory, appraisal theory and literary stylistics, is applied to a wide range of languages: English, including Scottish and business English, Italian, Spanish, West and South Slavic languages. As a highly coherent collection of innovative research papers, the volume will be welcomed by researchers of (im)politeness, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, both from a historical and contemporary perspective.

From the Middle Ages up to the present day, this book traces politeness in the history of the English language.

Imprisoned in English argues that in the present English-dominated world, social sciences and the humanities are locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English and that scholars need to break away from this framework to reach a more universal, culture-independent perspective on things human.

"A collection of essays that discuss representative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and English views of American democracy and society, and offer a critical assessment of various narrative constructions of American life, society, and culture"--Provided by publisher.

This detailed study of eighty European journeys examines the everyday spatial concerns of nineteenth-century travelers, with a focus on travelers from the Netherlands and North Sea region. From common soldiers in revolutionary Belgium to guests of the tsars in Russia, many of their travel accounts are here examined for the first time. Chapters analyze the different meanings of the home and homeliness; travelers’ desires for socializing but equally their intricate privacy norms; their intense attachment to cleanliness, order, space, and light; and the discomforts of cold, hot, wet, hard, and cramped spaces. Author Anna P.H. Geurts details what spatial characteristics travelers valued, what measures they took to ensure them, and what sensations, emotions, and thoughts this resulted in. Geurts’s careful attention to gender, class, and individual experience turns existing conceptions of industrial modernity on their head. From Napoleonic stagecoaches and sailing-boats to the steam-powered journeys of the belle époque, the continuities in travel experiences are surprising, as are the commonalities between travelers of different social classes and genders. Significant shifts in their spatial micropolitics should be sought less in the world of administration and industrial machinery, and more in travelers’ increasingly flexible and egalitarian mindset and changing economic relations. This book will be of value to students and researchers of cultural history as well as contemporary planning and design.

An innovative new social history of Thailand told through the lens of changing ideals of manners, civility and behaviour.

An innovative re-evaluation of the concept of anarchy in theorizing diplomacy between states which draws on a historically sensitive re-evaluation of the ideological uses of politeness in the anarchist thought of William Godwin.

Politeness as practised across 22 European societies, firmly set within critical debates developed since the 1980s, is here presented in ways related to concrete situations in which language-users interact with one another to achieve their goals. Areas covered include types of politeness, forms of address, negotiation and small-talk in various contexts.

This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.