Soothing the Self: Medicine Advertisement and the Cult of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Springfield, Illinois

Author(s):  
Emma Verstraete
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.


Author(s):  
James Deaville

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy

Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.


Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 143-154
Author(s):  
Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel

Margaret Fuller was an American philosopher, writer, journalist and one of the first gender theorists. The article examines Fuller’s work and life in the context of 19th century American culture and social determinants influencing women’s lives. From a very early age, Fuller perceived her role in society different from the role designed for her as a biological girl by the cultural model of the times she lived in. The article focuses on Fuller’s achievements in the context of the self-made man/woman concept.


Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson

This chapter traces the popular usage of “genius” in the nineteenth century. If genius no longer has the self-evidence that was attributed to it in the eighteenth century, this is due in part to the profligacy with which the word had come to be used. While the term is widely invoked—in fact, ever more widely so—it is rarely the subject of sustained theoretical scrutiny of the type established by aesthetics and philosophy in the previous century. The genius celebrated in this popular usage was, more often than not, a collective phenomenon linking success or supremacy with the individual character of institutional or abstract entities in a way that combined genius as ingenium with genius as the form of superlative excellence.


Author(s):  
John Stokes

This Chapter examines the self-styled late nineteenth-century humanitarians and their formal organization, ‘The Humanitarian League’. It stresses the visionary zeal of the movement, and examines the wide range of topics discussed in the League’s two main journals, such as vegetarianism and vivisection, pointing up the tensions and paradoxes in humanitarian thinking at the time. It concludes by noting the holistic nature of the humanitarian vision and its echoes in later phenomena such as eco-criticism and the green movement.


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