Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–1850: An Analysis

1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
The Self ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Recent Developments

Whilst it would be wrong to claim that voluntary societies in Britain were new in the period 1780 to 1850, the growth of large industrial and urban populations was accompanied by an increase in the foundation and prosperity of such societies. These societies were diverse in their purpose, form, size and membership. Edward Baines, junior, one of the self-appointed tribunes of the industrial middle class, in 1843 described recent developments as follows:

Outsourcing the Self

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Romantic Relationships ◽  
Call Center ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
First World ◽  
Class Youth ◽  
Call Center Workers

This chapter analyzes how call center workers, who are mostly middle- and working-class youth, create narratives that are described as expressing modern forms of “individualized Indianness.” The chapter demonstrates how call center workers produce narratives of individualized Indianness by engaging in practices of mimicry, accent training, and consumption; by going to public spaces such as bars and pubs; and by having romantic relationships that are largely hidden from their families. The narratives examined in this chapter are created out of an asymmetrical context of power as young Indians work as “subjects” of a global economy who primarily serve “First World” customers. The interviews with Indian youth reflect how tradition and modernity, mimicry and authenticity, collude with each other to dialogically create new middle-class subjectivities.

The Sentimental Mask

PMLA ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 78 (5) ◽  
pp. 529-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Parnell
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Adequate Definition ◽  
Restoration Comedy

Fifty years after the modern study of sentimentalism was inaugurated by Ernest Bernbaum, the problem remains whether the term has ever been satisfactorily defined or described. Two recent developments reveal some of the difficulties: Arthur Sherbo in The English Sentimental Drama takes five basic criteria considered by most authorities as typical, and shows that they may all apply to plays demonstrably not sentimental. John Harrington Smith, in the preface to The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (1948), announces that he has completely avoided the term “sentimental” as too vague to be of much value. Yet Ronald Crane, writing fourteen years before, assumed the essential traits of sentimentalism to be fairly clear, and Norman Holland has implied that two criteria borrowed from Bernbaum and Krutch still supply an adequate definition. There is not even agreement whether sentimentality is a positive or negative quality. Krutch and Sherbo feel that it is false and dishonest, therefore bad. Crane concedes that it is somewhat limited intellectually, but emphasizes its humanitarianism and emotional warmth, especially the “self-approving joy” that makes virtue satisfying. Bernbaum vacillates between sympathy and contempt.

scholarly journals The Shape of Knowledge: Children and the Visual Culture of Literacy and Numeracy

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Daniel Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Instructional Literature

The ArgumentIn 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

What Kind of Job Is That for a Nice Jewish Boy?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
The Self ◽  
American Jews ◽  
New Models ◽  
Economic Position ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American Jews wrestled with new models of masculinity that their new economic position enabled. For many American Jewish novelists, intellectuals, and clergy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal pressure on Jewish men to become middle-class breadwinners betrayed older, more Jewishly-authentic, notions of appropriate masculinity. Their writing promoted alternative, Jewish masculine ideals such as the impoverished scholar and the self-sacrificing soldier, crafting a profoundly gendered critique of Jewish upward mobility.

New Bodies in Cities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachana Johri
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Globalizing cities in India offer the promise of escape from caste- and gender-based identities, but those who make the journey often encounter difficulties, including the fragmentation of their home experience, and even violence once they get to the city. Lower-middle-class girls are seen as a challenge to ideals of chaste Indian womanhood, while Dalit boys and girls are challenging dominant ideals in Brahmanical India by questioning the nation state and its inherited ideals, including the caste system. This paper draws on cinematic and lived narratives to argue that cities in India are characterized by highly contested spaces, bodily practices, and technologies of the self, where the body of the city, and bodies in the city, are the lived realities of these tense negotiations.

The City Sketch

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-104
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
City Life ◽  
The City

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

scholarly journals Leisure, Loafing, and Life as Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
Petar Bagarić
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Work Organization ◽  
The Self ◽  
Total Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Moment ◽  
Life Work

Although leisure and idleness are promoted as a panacea for the problems of postmodern man, everyday logic of postindustrial societies is still subjected to the logic of “total work”. Throughout modernism, the discourse of leisure allowed for a certain separation of the worker from the work regime. However, this discourse lost its function in postmodernism due to the contemporary erasure of boundaries between life, work, and the self. The disappearance of these boundaries, due to technological development and newer forms of work organization, is an important element on the basis of which the contemporary middle class gradually assumes the position of the former working class within the system. Thus, it can be concluded that the fundamental way in which the avoidance of the world of total work is possible today is not leisure, free, fulfilled, and meaningful time, but shallow loafing, a stolen free moment otherwise scheduled for work.

scholarly journals M-BRANE MODELS AND LOOP SPACES

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (20) ◽  
pp. 1230019 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN SÄMANN
Keyword(s):  
Loop Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
String Equation ◽  
Loop Spaces ◽  
Brane Model ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Brane Models ◽  
Space Approach

I review an extension of the ADHMN construction of monopoles to M-brane models. This extended construction gives a map from solutions to the Basu–Harvey equation to solutions to the self-dual string equation transgressed to loop space. Loop spaces appear in fact quite naturally in M-brane models. This is demonstrated by translating a recently proposed M5-brane model to loop space. Finally, I comment on some recent developments related to the loop space approach to M-brane models.

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