Caroline Bertonèche & Alexis Tadié (eds.), Sports and Sociability in Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool: LUP, 2025).
- Abstract -
The age of Enlightenment was also an age of development of sporting and physical activities. This book aims to study the forms of sociability induced and defined by such activities in the eighteenth century. By bringing together archival work and textual analysis the book insists on the definitions and representations of sporting practices. These range from traditional pastimes such as hunting or archery, to more novel forms of recreation such as swimming or mountaineering. The book investigates the modes of association which were set in motion either through participation, or through various forms of spectatorship (ranging from watching to betting). Societies, associations, clubs, and more informal gatherings characterised this burgeoning interest for sports. They provoked new interactions between individuals and the social group, new forms of distinction as well, and transformed the apprehension of the natural world. Through a variety of case studies, the book provides an original perspective on the transformations of sociability in the eighteenth century. It integrates the findings of historical inquiry into groups and associations linked with sports as well as the analysis of the literary projections of such physical activities, notably by the Romantic poets from Thomson to Keats.
ALEXIS TADIÉ is professor of English Literature at Sorbonne Université, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. He has held visiting research fellowships at various universities, including recently Durham University and Trinity College, Cambridge.
CAROLINE BERTONÈCHE is Professor of British Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes. She has published several articles on Romantic poetry. She is the author of four monographs on John Keats. She is a Fellow the Royal Society of Arts, of the Royal Historical Society and an honorary President of the SERA (Société d’Études du Romantisme Anglais).
CONTRIBUTORS: Mike Higgins, Ben Jackson, Marion Amblard, John Whale, Pierre Labrune & Kimberley Page-Jones, Laurent Folliot, Alexis Tadié, Pauline Hortolland, Simon Bainbridge, Claire Wrobel et Meiko O'Halloran.
288 pages / 14 October 2025
ISBN: 9781836245278 (Paperback)
eISBN:9781836249146 (PDF)
eISBN:9781836249177 (ePub)
Alain Kerhervé & Véronique Léonard-Roques (dir.), Amitiés épistolaires en France et au Royaume-Uni. Des Lumières à l'aube de la Grande Guerre (PUR, 2025).
- Abstract -
Des Lumières à l’aube de la Grande Guerre, comment s’exprime l’amitié dans les correspondances privées en France et en Angleterre, voire entre ressortissants de ces deux puissances européennes ? Comment les lettres traduisent-elles les possibles évolutions de cette relation affective en une période de profondes mutations où se reconfigurent les modèles de sociabilité ? Cet ouvrage se propose d’éclairer l’amitié à la lumière de la forme de sociabilité codifiée, mais flexible, que constitue l’échange épistolaire. Il s’intéresse à différents types d’amitiés épistolaires à l’ère où, en France comme au Royaume-Uni, la valorisation de la vie privée s’accompagne d’une conscience nouvelle de l’individu. Aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, la correspondance amicale est en effet une des pratiques privilégiées de l’intime. Mais, chargée de suppléer à l’absence et d’inscrire la relation dans la durée, la lettre constitue le support fragile d’une amitié jamais acquise. En cette période de multiples bouleversements sociohistoriques, les correspondances peuvent toutefois avoir raison des mobilités individuelles, des idéologies, des tensions et des frontières. Avant que ne s’imposent d’autres modes de communication, elles constituent un matériau privilégié pour appréhender une relation interpersonnelle élective susceptible de se muer en sentiment amoureux, de s’épuiser, voire de se retourner en inimitié.
ALAIN KERHERVÉ est professeur de littérature et de civilisation britanniques à l’université de Brest et membre de l’unité de recherche HCTI-Héritage et création dans le texte et l’image. Il travaille principalement sur l’écriture épistolaire anglaise au XVIIIe siècle.
VÉRONIQUE LÉONARD-ROQUES est professeure en littératures comparées à l’université de Brest et spécialiste de la réception des mythes. Ses recherches portent aussi sur les écrits viatiques, en particulier féminins, du tournant du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours.
CONTRIBUTORS: Marianne Charrier-Vozel, Jeremy Elprin, Mascha Hansen, Sabrina Juillet Garzón, Alain Kerhervé, Isabelle Le Pape, Véronique Léonard-Roques, Yann Mortelette, Kimberley Page-Jones, Jean-Charles Perquin, Thierry Poyet, Laetitia Saintes, Adnana Sava, Catherine Thomas-Ripault.
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Date de parution : 21/08/2025
Collection : Interférences
Domaines : Littérature, Littérature générale
ISBN : 978-2-7535-9824-9
Nb de pages : 304
Valérie Capdeville & Kimberley Page-Jones (dir.), La fabrique des sociabilités en Europe et dans les colonies. Espaces et identités (XVIIIe - XIXe siècles) (Presses universitaires de Montréal, 2023).
- Abstract -
Comment, aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, en Europe et dans les colonies, les pratiques de sociabilité et la construction des espaces ont-elles contribué à fabriquer les identités ? Question complexe, à laquelle les auteurs de ce livre parviennent à répondre en faisant dialoguer une variété d’exemples et de terrains d’enquête. De la Wilderness nord-américaine à l’Inde du Raj britannique, des taverniers québécois aux paysans bas-bretons, des salons et des réseaux curiaux aux communautés d’esclaves, ils soulignent l’importance de la sociabilité dans la formation des espaces collectifs et des identités, ainsi que celle des circulations et des transferts dans l’élaboration des formes de sociabilité. Cette approche multiéchelle – locale, nationale et mondiale – offre un angle d’analyse particulièrement fertile pour saisir les processus par lesquels la vie en société et les particularités identitaires et culturelles apparaissent, se transforment, s’épanouissent et s’affirment.
VALÉRIE CAPDEVILLE est maître de conférences HDR en histoire et civilisation britanniques à l’Université Sorbonne Paris Nord.
KIMBERLEY PAGE-JONES est maître de conférences en études britanniques à l’Université de Bretagne Occidentale.
CONTRIBUTORS: Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Valérie Capdeville, Aurélie Chatenet-Calyste, Simon Deschamps, Isabelle Guégan, Sihem Kchaou, Pierre Labrune, Giacomo Lorandi, Laurence Machet, Fabienne Moine, Michael North, Miles Ogborn, Kimberley Page-Jones, Mathieu Perron, Léa Rénucci.
328 pages / avril 2023 
Papier ISBN : 978-2-7606-4498-4
PDF ISBN : 978-2-7606-4499-1 download for free
E-Pub ISBN : 978-2-7606-4500-4
Sebastian Domsch & Mascha Hansen (eds.), British Sociability in the European Enlightenment: Cultural Practices and Personal Encounters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Interrogates how sociable meetings between individuals of different cultures actually proceed, and which meetings proved to be meaningful or influential in the long run. Examines how British liberty and literature were admired and rejected, emulated and contested throughout Europe. Explores sociable encounters ending in mutual understanding and conflict alike.
- Abstract -
This volume covers a broad range of everyday private and public, touristic, commercial and fictional encounters between Britons and continental Europeans, in a variety of situations and places: moments that led to a meaningful exchange of opinions, practices, or concepts such as friendship or politeness. It argues that, taken together, travel accounts, commercial advice, letters, novels and philosophical works of the long eighteenth century, reveal the growing impact of British sociability on the sociable practices on the continent, and correspondingly, the convivial turn of the Enlightenment. In particular, the essays collected here discuss the ways and means – in conversations, through travel guides or literary works – by which readers and writers grappled with their cultural differences in the field of sociability. The first part deals with travellers, the second section with the spreading of various cultural practices, and the third with fictional encounters in philosophical dialogues and novels.
SEBASTIAN DOMSCH, Chair of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Greifswald, Germany, is the author of The Emergence of Literary Criticism in 18th-Century Britain (2014) and co-editor of British and European Romanticisms (2007) and Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern (2017).
MASCHA HANSEN, Lecturer in British Literature at the University of Greifswald, Germany, focuses on women in the long eighteenth century, and has published on Frances Burney, the Bluestockings, Hester Thrale and Queen Charlotte. Her particular interests range from women’s life writings to their involvement in sociability, science and education.
CONTRIBUTORS: Katrin Berndt, Annick Cossic-Péricarpin, Sebastian Domsch, Mascha Hansen, Allan Ingram, Alain Kerhervé, Jakub Lipski, Patrick Müller, Kimberley Page-Jones, Susanne Schmid, Michael Szczekalla, Helen Williams.
XIII, 242 pages / January 2021 
14.81 x 21.01 cm
12 b/w illustrations
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-52567-5
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-52567-5
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-52566-8
Valérie Capdeville & Alain Kerhervé (eds.), British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Challenging the Anglo-French Connection (Boydell & Brewer, UK, 2019).
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.
- Abstract -
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 sociability within 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.
VALÉRIE CAPDEVILLE is Senior Lecturer in British Civilisation at the University of Paris 13.
ALAIN KERHERVÉ is Professor of British Studies at the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines Victor Segalen, University of West Brittany (UBO Brest).
CONTRIBUTORS: Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Valérie Capdeville, Michèle Cohen, Norbert Col, Annick Cossic, Brian Cowan, Rémy Duthille, Markman Ellis, Allan Ingram, Emrys Jones, Alain Kerhervé, Elisabeth Martichou, Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Ian Newman, Jane Rendall.
Series: Studies in the Eighteenth Century
320 pages / June 2019
23.4 x 15.6 cm
10 b/w illustrations
Ebook (EPDF) ISBN: 9781787444904
Hardcover ISBN: 9781783273591
Paperback ISBN: 9781837651283 June 2024