British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Challenging the Anglo-French Connection(Studies in the Eighteenth Century)

This innovative collection explores how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The contributors use a wide range of sources - from city plans to letter-writing manuals, from the writings of Edmund Burke to poems and essays about the social practices of the tea table, and a variety of methodological approaches to explore philosophical, political and social aspects of the emergence of British sociability in this period. They create a rounded picture of sociability as it happened in public, private and domestic settings - in Masonic lodges and radical clubs, in painting academies and private houses - and compare specific examples and settings with equivalents in France, bringing out for instance the distinctively homo-social and predominantly masculine form of British sociability, the role of sociabilitywithin a wider national identity still finding its way after the upheaval of civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and the almost unique capacity of the British model of sociability to benefit from its own apparent tensions and contradictions.

Table of Contents:
Foreword - Michèle Cohen Introduction - Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé 'Restoration' England and the History of Sociability - Brian Cowan Mapping Sociability on Restoration Townscapes - Marie-Madeleine Martinet Club Sociability and the Emergence of New 'Sociable' Practices - Valérie Capdeville The Tea-table, Women, and Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain - Markman Ellis 'Amateurs' vs. Connoisseurs in French and English Academies of Painting - Elisabeth Martichou Masonic Connections and Rivalries between France and Britain - Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire Competing Models of Sociability: Smollett's Repossession of an Ailing British Body - Annick Cossic A Theory of British Epistolary Sociability? - Alain Kerhervé Gender and the Practices of Polite Sociability in Late Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh - Jane Rendall In Company and Out: The Public/Private Selves of Johnson and Boswell - Allan Ingram Friendship and Unsociable Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Literature - Emrys Jones The Anti-social Convivialist: Toasting and Resistance to Sociability - Ian Newman Sociability and the Glorious Revolution: A Dubious Connection in Burke's Philosophy - Norbert Col Respectability vs Political Agency: A Dilemma for British Radical Societies - Remy Duthille Conclusion - Valérie Capdeville

About the Author :
VALÉRIE CAPDEVILLE is Professor of British History and Civilisation at the University of Rennes 2. ALAIN KERHERVÉ is Professor of British Studies at the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines Victor Segalan, University of West Brittany (UBO Brest). VALÉRIE CAPDEVILLE is Professor of British History and Civilisation at the University of Rennes 2. MICHÈLE COHEN is emeritus Professor of Humanities, Richmond, American International University in London, UK. BRIAN COWAN is an Associate Professor of History at McGill University. MARKMAN ELLIS is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. ALAIN KERHERVÉ is Professor of British Studies at the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines Victor Segalan, University of West Brittany (UBO Brest). Jane Rendall is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Eighteenth Studies and the History Department at the University of York. She has published widely on women's and gender history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on Scotland.

Review :
This volume is a great tribute to the exciting and vibrant research taking place in the history of eighteenth-century British sociability. . . . Wide-ranging and eclectic in its methodological and thematic approach, it is clear that this volume will appeal to a wide range of scholars, whether approaching this from a historical, literary, philosophical, political, or social perspective. [...] it is impossible to miss the relevance and significance of this publication's exploration of the limits, paradoxes, and conditions of eighteen-century sociability.