Overview
Integrates etiquette into the inventory of politeness research and historical pragmatics
Interrogates etiquette books from Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA
Considers the continuing role of etiquette in the 21st century
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book is a groundbreaking study of etiquette in the nineteenth century when the success of etiquette books reached unprecedented heights in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. It positions etiquette as a fully-fledged theoretical concept within the fields of politeness studies and historical pragmatics. After tracing the origin of etiquette back to Spanish court protocol, the analysis takes a novel approach to key aspects of etiquette: its highly coercive and intricate scripts; the liminal rituals of social gatekeeping; the fear for blunders; the obsession with precedence. Interrogating the complex relationship between historical etiquette and adjacent notions of politeness, conduct, morality, convention, and ritual, the study prompts questions on gender stereotyping and class privilege surrounding the present-day etiquette revival. Through adopting a unique comparative approach and a corpus-based methodology this study seeks to revitalise our understandings of etiquette. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as those in neighbouring fields such as literary criticism, gender studies and family life, domestic and urban spaces.
Reviews
“From Spanish court protocol in the sixteenth century to present-day online advice, this extremely rich book traces the fascinating history of the concept of etiquette in Western culture from a politeness-theoretic angle.” (Andreas H. Jucker, Professor of English Linguistics, University of Zurich)
“Annick Paternoster's book is a timely, insightful and accessible contribution to the field of historical politeness research. Paternoster provides a fascinating insight into the realm of etiquette manuals in Europe, which is an important albeit regretfully neglected area of politeness research. The book is a must read for both academics and students with interest in the history of social interaction in Europe.” (Dániel Z. Kádár, Ordinary Member of Academia Europaea, Chair Professor, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Research Professor, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)
“This book sheds light on a past that countless novels, films and TV series have popularized: the world of nineteenth-century polite society, of dinners, receptions and dances, where the social skills of men and women were crucial for the establishment and maintenance of their place in society. That world obeyed strictly codified rules of appropriate behaviour – rules that the author investigates in a broad range of Italian, French, Dutch, British and American texts while placing them in accurate socio-historical perspective.” (Marina Dossena, University of Bergamo, Italy)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Annick Paternoster is a Lecturer at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. She lectures Rhetoric and Stylistics at the Istituto di studi italiani, where she pursues an interdisciplinary research agenda based on historical pragmatics, the pragmatics of politeness and metapragmatics of Italian. Born in Belgium, she holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Historical Etiquette
Book Subtitle: Etiquette Books in Nineteenth-Century Western Cultures
Authors: Annick Paternoster
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07578-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-07577-3Published: 08 December 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-07580-3Published: 08 December 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-07578-0Published: 06 December 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 407
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations, 21 illustrations in colour
Topics: Pragmatics, Historical Linguistics, History, general, Nineteenth-Century Literature