lin·gua·phile

My advisor, who does not actually know I am a fan or that I just wrote a paper for another course partially about fanfiction.

because I am writing a paper (for GRADUATE SCHOOL) about Denis Diderot’s Eloge de Richardson, in which he basically fangirls all over Samuel Richardson’s works

and in the English translation that I read for class, Diderot talks about a friend who is “one of the most tender-hearted men I know, and one of the keenest devotees of Richardson: very nearly as keen as me”

but the word that gets translated as “devotee” in English is “fanatique” in French!

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FANDOM IS A THING, GUYS!

(Also, I am pretty sure that at some point this summer I will write my first ever RPF because “participants in the eighteenth century Clarissa fandom” is very rapidly becoming one of MY fandoms.)

playingjax replied to your post: Why I should not be allowed books or the internet or probably a graduate degree

i shouldn’t be allowed access to your blog because i’m about to tell you that i would read both of these things and they would be my gateway for reading the real materials… *jedi handwave* carry on.

Heh I am definitely going to do the latter (in fact am writing up a semi-analytical, semi-fannish post for LJ as a way of figuring out the Clarissa/Anna dynamic?) and will probably also, at some point, do the former, because (and I cannot believe I am about to say this) there is not enough 18th century RPF from earlier in the century and/or from England. Lots of Founding Fathers stuff, but WHO CARES, they’re American, BORING! (Also none of them were novelists. Doubly boring!)

candace-reads-clarissa:

I figured if anyone had ever attempted to turn the longest novel in the English language into a movie, it would be the BBC.

What I had not figured was that Sean Bean would play Lovelace.

If any picture could be worth a million words, it might be this one.

After this, the fact that the screenwriters were somehow able to condense 1,500 pages into four episodes is really not that shocking.

Despite the shock of Sean Bean (Sean Bean!), my favorite part of this film’s IMDB page is its plot keywords:

Clarissa: wigs, harpsichords, and sword fights in the eighteenth century! (Which is just a fancy name for the 1700s in case you didn’t know that already.)

Now, if only the harpsichord was somehow involved in the sword fight, I think I could die happy.

Just so you all know, at some point in late April/early May when I am done with the novel, there will be a liveblog of this film. A seriously morally-conflicted liveblog. Because on the one hand Lovelace is sort of the literary rake/libertine/all-around horrible human being and what he does to Clarissa is utterly unconscionable. BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, 1991 SEAN BEAN.

18thcenturylove:

a-l-ancien-regime:

as time goes by… (by sdmartinez Sandra)

 The things you notice in the background… :3

The Fragonard painting in the background is one of my all-time favorites; I honestly saw it before I saw the clock.

playingjax asked: 1, 11, 31, 40. oh, and 14 because lol. (let's be real, i would ask for all of them, but i suspect i shouldn't)

1. What’s a question you’re afraid to ask? To whom?

Most of the questions I’m most afraid to ask are self-directed. Right now, probably, “Are you happy?”

11. Which fictional character would you most like to have lunch with and why?

Mmm, this is hard, there are too many! But right now, I think I would love to have lunch with Deryn Sharp (hero of the Leviathan books I keep nattering on about, and which every human being with any interest in World War I and/or quasi-steampunk and/or cross-dressing and/or ladies being awesome should go read!) in 1920s London. We would have been introduced by Dr. Barlow, who would’ve known me thanks to my mum’s interest in the implementation of medical fabrications in wartime (because obviously if I lived in this universe, my mother would be working for the Red Cross and would have known Florence Nightingale, while my father would be headmaster of a grammar school despite coming from a family of well-known botanical fabricators).*

Alek would have been called off on some kind of work that Deryn couldn’t help with because she was still injured from a previous incident, and she’d be spitting and cursing at anyone trying to keep her in bed and off her feet (my mother and Dr. Barlow included), and I would be assisting at the hospital while on holiday from university and offer to take her out for lunch, promising mum and Dr. Barlow that I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. Deryn would be torn between liking me for getting her out of “that barking infirmary” and disliking me for being something like a watchdog, but she’d find some kind of grudging respect for me when, instead of heading for one of the fancy eateries/tourist traps in the area, we ended up in a cozy out-of-the-way pub. We’d get to talking and I’d ask her about her adventures and she’d ask me about my studies and what started out as just lunch would end up turning into lunch and discussion and an afternoon pint, and we’d finally leave the pub just as the first of the post-work crowd started filtering in, chatting like old friends.

*In the real world, Mom is a nurse and Dad is a high school principal, but Dad’s ancestors came to California from Britain in the 1800s to set up a flower-growing/seed-producing business, which a branch of our family still sort of owns and operates.

14. What kind of underwear do you imagine Sherlock Holmes wears?

Depends if we’re talking Arthur Conan Doyle or BBC. I know nothing about Victorian undergarments but I suspect BBC!Sherlock wears unassuming yet comfortable briefs.

31. Describe your dream library.

Oh look, I’m going to cheat and answer this by quoting my own novel-in-progress, The Printer’s Tale, in which the main character accidentally stumbles into the (off-limits!) library in the manor house where she works:

Noelle lost her breath, and almost her lamp, in shock. Rather than opening into a closet, the door led to a railed and elevated platform that hugged the wall on three sides of an enormous room. The fourth side was all windows, opening up into a courtyard she could see only dimly in the dying light of the sunset and her own small candle. A few feet in front of her the floor just stopped, so Noelle could see down to the story below her. Near the windows was a space empty of bookshelves, full instead of plush armchairs and small low tables. Ladders descended from the ends of the platform closest to the windows, allowing the observer from the upper deck to return, if desired, to the floor below.

But this strange architecture was not what astounded her. No—what caused her to lose her breath, what made her fumble with the lamp in her hands so that the small light and shadow that it cast flickered along the walkway in front of her, were the books. Noelle did not think she had any way to comprehend the number of books that filled this space. The walls that the walkway hugged were lined from floor to ceiling with bookcases, and it seemed that almost every shelf was full. Noelle took a deep breath to steady herself and discovered that the room even smelled like books. She could feel the bite of the ink in the air, the tang of mellowed leather, and the indescribable scent of paper that was beginning to age.

40. Post a short excerpt of your life.

I find this question to be ambiguous, but mostly for a silly reason: the word “biography” doesn’t come into its current usage/frequency until the mid-to-late eighteenth century (and this is a century I spend a lot of time with!), and before then “a life” is what we would now think of as a biography. So my initial response to this question is to write an excerpt of my own future biography, written in the style of some mid-eighteenth-century writer like Samuel Johnson.

Which might sound something like this.

As a young woman, Miss C—— was overwhelmingly infatuated with all manner of marvellous tales, which, though they posed a real danger to her virtue, did not fail to kindle in her a fascination for the fantastic ultimately beneficial to her career as a fabulist. Close acquaintances of the family relay that once when gifted by an elderly relation with the funds to purchase a new frock, she expressed dismay toward the source of such benevolence and heartily implored that in future she might not be given any loose change but that which she would be allowed to spend on books. This earned the distaste of her elderly relation, but paradoxically gained her the respect of her parents, in particular her father, who made it his duty from thenceforth to supply her with whatever reading material she desired.

(Haha, wow, fictionalizations of my life into the eighteenth century and the early twentieth century are so much more fun to write about than my actual life, maybe I should start journaling all my life events as if they were happening in different time periods.)

posthorn:

The Turgot Map of Paris was commissioned in 1734 by Michel-Étienne Turgot, and printed between 1734 and 1736.

The map is drawn from an isometric perspective and is in the form of 20 separate, non-overlapping engravings. The assembled map is approximately 2.5m high by 3.2m wide. The original copper plates are kept at the Chalcography of the Louvre, where they are still used to reprint copies of the map which are available for purchase.

The map can be found in a single file at Wikimedia Commons, and divided up into higher-resolution chunks at the Kyoto University Library and at Harvard University.

Nnnngh you guy I love old maps and this one is BEAUTIFUL. Ugh. Must have.