Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Spectacular passions: eighteenth-century oratory and the reform of eloquence
- 2 Bodies on the borders of politeness: ‘Orator Henley’, Methodist enthusiasm, and polite literature
- 3 Thomas Sheridan: forging the British body
- 4 The art of acting: mid-century stagecraft and the broadcast of feeling
- 5 Polite reading: sentimental fiction and the performance of response
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Bodies on the borders of politeness: ‘Orator Henley’, Methodist enthusiasm, and polite literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Spectacular passions: eighteenth-century oratory and the reform of eloquence
- 2 Bodies on the borders of politeness: ‘Orator Henley’, Methodist enthusiasm, and polite literature
- 3 Thomas Sheridan: forging the British body
- 4 The art of acting: mid-century stagecraft and the broadcast of feeling
- 5 Polite reading: sentimental fiction and the performance of response
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Manner of the Itinerants' holding-forth is generally very boisterous and shocking, and adapted, to the best of their Skill, to alarm the Imagination, and to raise a Ferment in the Passions, often attended with screaming and trembling of the Body. The Preacher now grows more tempestuous and dreadful in his Manner of Address, stamps and shrieks, and endeavours all he can to increase the rising Consternation, which is sometimes spread over a great Part of the Assembly in a few Minutes from its first Appearance. And to compleat the Work, the Preacher has his Recourse still to more frightful Representations; that he sees Hell-flames flashing in their Faces; and that they are now! now! now! dropping into Hell! into the Bottom of Hell! This boisterous Method seldom or never fails to set them screaming; and very often they grow distracted.
Theophilus Evans (1757)UNRULY BODIES
The development of polite discourse in eighteenth-century Britain, I have been suggesting, involved a positive valorisation of somatically displayed passions; the body animated by passions performed a symbolic function, standing as an accessible emblem for a society in which conspicuously patrician forms of expression were becoming less relevant or less tenable as the middle classes began to claim an increasingly significant share in public life. But the body image expressive of politeness was also given definition through the rejection of forms of somatic performance that visibly undermined values aspired to within the developing society.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004