The discourse of manners and politeness in Restoration and
eighteenth-century drama
The eighteenth century is often referred to as the
age of politeness, and the term politeness has been argued
to be a key term in a variety of settings at this time. This paper sets out
to investigate the discourse of politeness and, more generally, the
discourse of manners during this period and the period leading up to it
(1660 to 1790). It focuses on the vocabulary used in talking about manners
and politeness and on the way this vocabulary is used in actual
interactions. In a first step, it investigates several large corpora and
what they can tell us about the development of the vocabulary of manners and
politeness before it zooms in, in a second step, on a more detailed
investigation of three comedies of the period: Aphra Behn’s The Town-Fop: or Sir Timothy
Tawdrey (1676), Sir Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers
(1722), and Oliver Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night
(1773). A close reading and a careful analysis of the discourse
of manners and politeness, and crucially the discourse of violations of
manners and politeness, in these three plays reveals a significant shift
from a preoccupation with honour and reputation in the Restoration period to
the politeness of a good character in the early eighteenth century and
finally to a concern for polished and somewhat superficial manners in the
late eighteenth century. The three comedies thus mirror in a detailed and
nuanced way what the development of the vocabulary of manners and politeness
suggests in a broad-brush perspective on a much larger scale.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The vocabulary of manners and politeness
- 3.The discourse of manners and politeness
- 4.Discussion and conclusion
-
Editions
-
Corpora and dictionaries
-
References
References
Editions
Behn, Aphra
2016 “
The
Town-Fop: or Sir Timothy
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Goldsmith, Oliver
1993 “
She
Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a
Night.” In
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Beggar’s Opera and Other Eighteenth-Century
Plays, ed. by
David W. Lindsay, 327–399. London: J. M. Dent.
Steele, Sir Richard
1993 “
The
Conscious
Lovers.” In
The
Beggar’s Opera and Other Eighteenth-Century
Plays, ed. by
David W. Lindsay, 65–143. London:J. M. Dent.
Corpora and dictionaries
ARCHER: A Representative
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Registers
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Correspondence (CEEC)
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English Texts (CLMET3.0)
Oxford English
Dictionary
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2004 The
Long 18th
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Diller, Hans-Jürgen, Hendrik de Smet, and Jukk Tyrkkö
2010 “
A
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Hynes, Peter
2004 “
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Jucker, Andreas H.
2016 “
Politeness
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Jucker, Andreas H.
2020 Politeness
in the History of English. From the Middle Ages to the Present
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Klein, Lawrence
1994 Shaftsbury
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Lindsay, David W.
(ed.) 1993 The
Beggar’s Opera and other Eighteenth-century
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Nevalainen, Terttu, and Heli Tissari
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Jucker, Andreas H.
2024.
Conduct politeness versus etiquette politeness: a terminological distinction.
Journal of Politeness Research 20:1
► pp. 87 ff.
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