The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5779952
AutoresLawrence E Klein (autor correspondente), Lawrence Klein
Ano1984
Volume18
Fascículo2
Páginas186-186
Data de publicação1984-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEighteenth-Century Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0013-2586 • E-ISSN: 1086-315X
EditoraJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2738536
OpenAlexW2331347025
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas31

POLITENESS BECAME A CONSPICUOUS PRESENCE in English discourse in the later seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries. The term itself had been in English for some time,' but, in the second part of the seventeenth century, it took on a new importance. It became a key word, a point of verbal intersection among different areas of human experience, providing a unifying rubric for greatly diverse activities. It grew to range over a new and wide set of objects: under its sway came gentlemen and ladies, society, learning, arts, writing and literature, nations, ages of human history. One task of this article is to sketch the widening semantic dimension of the term in this period. Politeness began its career with reference to social behavior, as a norm of social behavior, and, in the course of its growth, politeness always carried with it some of its original social force. Thus, its spread involved the infiltration of a social metaphor throughout discourse more generally. Various areas into which politeness penetrated came to be articulated as modes of sociability. Discourse became deeply figured with models of social interaction. It is in keeping with eighteenth-century idiom to refer to this process as one of commercialization. Commerce in the eighteenth century, like conversation as well, related to a wide range of interactional

Linguistics · Politeness · Sociology · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Scottish History and National Identity