Cities, Texts, and Social Decline across the Eighteenth-Century Eurasian Continent

The UCLA Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies presents a talk on cities and social decline in eighteenth century Eurasia as a part of the core conference "Moralism, Fundamentalism, and the Rhetoric of Decline in Eurasia, 1600–1900."

Cities, Texts, and Social Decline across the Eighteenth-Century Eurasian Continent
Chair: Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Los Angeles

Spencer Jackson, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles
Pope, Swift, and the Ambivalent Exoticism of Feminine Commerce

Keith McMahon, University of Kansas
Social Decline and Sexual Disorder in Fiction of the Qing Dynasty

*This talk is Session 2 of a three-session conference organized by Clark Professors Andrea S. Goldman and Gabriel Piterberg of UCLA. Register here by February 1st, 2013. All students, UC faculty and staff may register via e-mail by sending their name, affiliation and phone number to c1718cs@humnet.ucla.edu. Complimentary lunch and other refreshments are provided to all registrants.

The Clark and Center core program for 2012–2013 explores responses to crises and upheavals in early modern landed empires, with special focus on the Ottoman and Qing empires. In particular, we will investigate the perceptions of temporary collapses of state power in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Detecting tendencies toward moralism and perceived decline in elite discourses and state policies, we will look at the ways such concerns were expressed in the domains of institutional and educational reforms, sexual mores, and cultural representation. We will also examine how social boundaries were both rigidified and contested at such moments of transition. We hope to discern shared patterns across Eurasia as well as trajectories specific to each political entity.

This conference will examine various social and literary expressions of discontent in the main urban centers across these landed empires.  Topics may include urban violence, sexual mores, literary lampoons, as well as states’ responses to such challenges to their authority.