Art and Archaeology

2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-93
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Divine Agency ◽  
Gustave Courbet ◽  
The Status ◽  
Spiritual Phenomena ◽  
Regular Practice

The nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet famously declared that he did not paint angels because he had never seen one. If artists of classical antiquity were ever troubled by such scruples regarding depictions of the supernatural, it is not (so far as I know) documented. This is not to say that the question of how an artist could represent, say, an Olympian deity, went completely unheeded: Dio Chrysostom's Olympic Discourse of ad 97 is one serious attempt to address that topic, with significant implications for the status of an artist (in this case, Pheidias) famed for ‘imagining’ the divine. Yet evidently the task of visualizing spiritual phenomena devolved no less to humble ‘craftsmen’ – as Hélène Collard shows in her monograph, Montrer l'invisible. This gathers a catalogue of 164 Athenian vases, mostly of the fifth-century bc, as case studies of the various formulations devised to show religious experience – many of them images upon objects, such as white-ground lekythoi, that may once have been used in particular rites and observances. Graphic traditions of mythology, and an established series of personification (e.g. Nike, Eros, Hypnos), assisted the process. However, many of the scenes collected by Collard do not apparently attempt to ‘show the invisible’. They seem, rather, to evoke the realities of regular practice – processions, libations, sacrifice, adornment of a stele. Such scenes only become ‘paranormal’ when invested with some extra knowing detail: for example, a large owl alighting upon an altar (presumably indicating the favour of Athena). And sometimes we simply have to look a little closer to apprehend the signs of divine agency. So a herm-head appears to lean forwards – as if to sip at the kantharos held up in propitiation – while the phallus of another herm seems distinctly to elongate in the presence of two ecstatic women.

Visualising Voice: Analysing spoken recordings of nineteenth-century French poetry

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-758
Author(s):  
Caroline Ardrey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Web Based ◽  
The Status ◽  
French Poetry ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article presents a digitally assisted mode of close listening as an innovative way of analysing poetry, through the implementation of a recently developed web-based tool called Visualising Voice, initially conceived to facilitate performance studies of French poetry. This article begins by establishing the status of close listening practices and their importance as a means of studying poetry in French, as well as considering the possibilities afforded by applying these practices to studying poetry in other languages. It then goes on to examine how the Visualising Voice tool can be applied to case studies of two poems—Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’Albatros’ (‘The Albatross’) and Paul Verlaine’s ‘Green’—each performed by three different speakers. This article argues that close listening using the Visualising Voice tool reveals subtle differences in the handling of metrical features and differences in performance styles of the same poem, which would be unlikely to be perceived by traditional listening methods. This article thus contends that close listening practices not only take the study of poetry beyond traditional modes of textual analysis but also that facilitating these practices through digital methodologies—such as those offered by the Visualising Voice tool—can transform the way in which poetry is read and understood beyond the academic sphere, in particular by general and younger audiences.

scholarly journals Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representing, Early Photography and Feeling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steph Schem Rogerson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Photographers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
Queer Representation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
A Site

By examining historical queerness through the lens of photography, this dissertation examines how the past contributes valuable knowledge about where we have been and where we are going. The history of queer representation is laden with violence, erasure and shame, as well as survival and persistence. I approach this legacy by bringing together three principal topics that I argue are closely related: queer photographic practices, the politics of the archive, and affect theory. Through the analysis of social conditions that formed discourses of homosexuality and industrialism’s development of photography in the late nineteenth century, the tension between oppressive laws and social change comes clear: it reveals a cultural crisis of taxonomy and representation in queer visual history. The slippages between cultural economy and representation are exemplified in nineteenth century visual culture as political economy was increasingly entwined with the individual and the state. Out of this matrix comes the advent of photography. Inexpensive and accessible mechanical reproduction made it possible for the apparatus of photography to be both complicit in the categorization and repression of homosexuality, as well as a site of subversion of the status quo. Conventions in portraiture photography inscribed the construction of normativity through ‘the cult of the empire,’ yet queer subjectivities challenged these standards. A number of specific case studies involving women photographers and photographic subjects – such as Mabel Hampton, Bonnie and Semoura Clark, Alice Austen, and found photographs from my personal collection illustrate a symbolic defiance to hegemonic structures. By investigating archival material with a specific focus on queer history and photography, the case studies illustrate how our affective lives are saturated with political meaning. Photography wields unusual power when examining the relationship between affect and feeling. The affect of photography derives from its insistence on the past. Yet, photography produces a here and now that can resist strictures of heteronormativity and patriarchy through politicized feelings. The approach to queer historization is firmly rooted in notions of social justice imperatives and anti-oppressive political strategies that include racism, gender inequality and classism. Queer archives evoke cultural persistence and knowledge through the affective context of remembering.

scholarly journals Paper, Plaster, Strings: Exploratory Material Mathematical Models between the 1860s and 1930s

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-467
Author(s):  
Michael Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mathematical Models ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Hyperbolic Plane ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Dimensional Model ◽  
Three Dimensional Model ◽  
The Status ◽  
String Models

Abstract Does the materiality of a three-dimensional model have an effect on how this model operates in an exploratory way, how it prompts discovery of new mathematical results? Material mathematical models were produced and used during the second half of the nineteenth century, visualizing mathematical objects, such as curves and surfaces—and these were produced from a variety of materials: paper, cardboard, plaster, strings, wood. However, the question, whether their materiality influenced the status of these models—considered as exploratory, technical, or representational—was hardly touched upon. This article aims to approach this question by investigating two case studies: Beltrami’s paper models vs. Dyck’s plaster ones of the hyperbolic plane; and Chisini’s string models of braids vs. Artin’s and Moishezon’s algebraization of these braids. These two case studies indicate that materiality might have a decisive role in how the model was taken into account mathematically: either as an exploratory or rather as a technical or pedagogical object.

scholarly journals Without Words You Spoke: Queer Representing, Early Photography and Feeling

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steph Schem Rogerson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Photographers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
Queer Representation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
A Site

By examining historical queerness through the lens of photography, this dissertation examines how the past contributes valuable knowledge about where we have been and where we are going. The history of queer representation is laden with violence, erasure and shame, as well as survival and persistence. I approach this legacy by bringing together three principal topics that I argue are closely related: queer photographic practices, the politics of the archive, and affect theory. Through the analysis of social conditions that formed discourses of homosexuality and industrialism’s development of photography in the late nineteenth century, the tension between oppressive laws and social change comes clear: it reveals a cultural crisis of taxonomy and representation in queer visual history. The slippages between cultural economy and representation are exemplified in nineteenth century visual culture as political economy was increasingly entwined with the individual and the state. Out of this matrix comes the advent of photography. Inexpensive and accessible mechanical reproduction made it possible for the apparatus of photography to be both complicit in the categorization and repression of homosexuality, as well as a site of subversion of the status quo. Conventions in portraiture photography inscribed the construction of normativity through ‘the cult of the empire,’ yet queer subjectivities challenged these standards. A number of specific case studies involving women photographers and photographic subjects – such as Mabel Hampton, Bonnie and Semoura Clark, Alice Austen, and found photographs from my personal collection illustrate a symbolic defiance to hegemonic structures. By investigating archival material with a specific focus on queer history and photography, the case studies illustrate how our affective lives are saturated with political meaning. Photography wields unusual power when examining the relationship between affect and feeling. The affect of photography derives from its insistence on the past. Yet, photography produces a here and now that can resist strictures of heteronormativity and patriarchy through politicized feelings. The approach to queer historization is firmly rooted in notions of social justice imperatives and anti-oppressive political strategies that include racism, gender inequality and classism. Queer archives evoke cultural persistence and knowledge through the affective context of remembering.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

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.

Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Silverstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.

The Cloud‐Astrophysics of Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Standard Edition ◽  
The One

This article discusses Xenophanes' “cloud astro-physics”. It analyses and explains all heavenly and meteorological phenomena in terms of clouds. It provides a view of this newer Xenophanes, who is now being recognized as an important philosopher-scientist in his own right and a crucial figure in the development of critical thought about human knowledge and its objects in the next generation of Presocratic thinkers. Xenophanes' account has been preserved in Aëtius, the doxographic compendium (1st or 2nd century ce) reconstructed by Hermann Diels late in the nineteenth century mainly from two sources that show extensive parallelism: pseudo-Plutarch Placita Philosophorum or Epitome of Physical Opinions (second century ce); and Ioannes Stobaeus' Eclogae Physicae or Physical Extracts (fifth century ce). In the Stobaeus version, which is also the one printed in the standard edition of the Pre-socratics.

Bandstands and Modernity: Constructing Spanish Cities Musically

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422097612
Author(s):  
Gloria Araceli Rodriguez-Lorenzo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Sonic Environment

This article analyses the interplay between sound and urban spaces in Spain, from the end of nineteenth century until 1936. Free outdoor concerts performed by bands in public urban spaces offered a new aural experience audience from across an increasing range of very diverse social groups, almost ritualizing both the practice of listening to music and the spaces in which that music was heard—all at a time when those very spaces were changing, in a way which mirrored the wider reconfiguration and modernization of Spanish cities. Case studies focusing on political, social, and cultural changes in urban spaces are analyzed, in order to understand how cities developed new spaces for social interaction, the modern sonic environment, and the ways in which those cities have appropriated culture for their citizens, as a symbol of urban modernity.

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