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Encyclopedia
Kit-Cat Club
[ Association / Associational culture / Politics & Society ]
… for its own use. The Kit-Cat was a space of exclusive membership, designed to build social capital, yet of open conversation on the basis of a pretended equality between men of vastly differing ranks and fortunes. 2 . The Spectator … Kit-Cat authors. 13 They conceived of literature as sociable – something to be composed collaboratively or inspired by conversation, then to be read, heard, or otherwise consumed collectively. Alongside subscriptions, the Kit-Cat Club made …
Friendship | Merchants | Patronage | Whigs
Encyclopedia
Patronage
[ Politics & Society / Social interaction ]
… (certainly somewhat disingenuously) that the real benefit a poet derived from a patron was not money or protection, but ‘conversation’, that is, the participation in a social and discursive space – the court – that synthesized political and aesthetic power. For Dryden, the patron provided ‘conversation’, the ideal form of criticism. As the eighteenth century progressed, there were just too many authors to all …
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