scholarly journals Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

Iraq ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Steven W. Holloway

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century is comprised of a diverse collection of essays featuring analyses of literary women writers, ecofeminism, feminist ecocriticism, and the value of the interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman, and nonliving entities as part of the environs. The book presents a case for the often-disregarded literary women writers of the long nineteenth century, who were active contributors to the discourse of natural history—the diachronic study of participants as part of a vibrant community interconnected by matter. While they were not natural philosophers as in the cases of Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Michael Faraday among others, these women writers did engage in acute observations of materiality in space (e.g., subjects, objects, and abjects), reasoned about their findings, and encoded their discoveries of nature in their literary and artistic productions. The collection includes discussions of the works of influential literary women from the long nineteenth century—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Celia Thaxter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francis Wright, and Lydia Maria Child—whose multi-directional observations of animate and inanimate objects in the natural domain are based on self-made discoveries while interacting with the environs.


2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reza Tabandeh

How were the Ni‘matullāhī masters successful in reviving Ni‘matullāhī Sufism in Shi‘ite Persia? This book investigates the revival of Ni‘matullāhī Sufi order after the death of the last Indian Ni‘matullāhī master, Riḍā ‘Alī Shāh (d. 1214/1799) in the Deccan. After the fall of Safavids, the revival movement of the Ni‘matullāhī order began with the arrival in Persia of the enthusiastic Indian Sufi master, Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Shāh, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Persian masters of the Ni‘matullāhī Order were able to solidify the order’s place in the mystical and theological milieu of Persia. Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Shāh and his disciples soon spread their mystical and ecstatic beliefs all over Persia. They succeeded in converting a large mass of Persians to Sufi teachings, despite the opposition and persecution they faced from Shi‘ite clerics, who were politically and socially the most influential class in Persia. The book demonstrates that Ḥusayn ‘Alī Shāh, Majdhūb ‘Alī Shāh, and Mast ‘Alī Shāh were able to consolidate the social and theological role of the Ni‘matullāhī order by reinterpreting and articulating classical Sufi teachings in the light of Persian Shi‎‘ite mystical theology.


Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace

This chapter examines how political history is reshaped by attention to the emotions. It explores how sentiment undergirded political identities and allegiances and how emotion shaped civic memory and consciousness in revolutionary and early-nineteenth-century America. From the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution, from the rise of eighteenth-century republicanism to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, emotion proved pivotal to political change. Whether animating the spirit of freedom or sparking action on behalf of the nation, emotion was, by definition, central to patriotism in all its dynamic forms. In addition to this, the chapter also considers why emotions have been excluded from traditional political narratives.


Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

In the nineteenth century, the allure of the past of the Great Civilizations was soon to be contested by an alternative—that of the national past. This interest had already grown in the pre-Romantic era connected to an emerging ethnic or cultural nationalism (Chapter 2). However, its charm would not be as enticing to the lay European man and woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who were much more under the influence of neoclassicism (Chapter 3). The Western European nations had no monuments comparable to the remains of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Before the Roman expansion into most of Western Europe in antiquity, there had been few significant buildings, apart from unspectacular prehistoric tombs and megalithic monuments whose significance was unrecognized by the modern scholar. Roman remains beyond Italy were not as impressive as those found to the south of the Alps. Because of this it seemed much more interesting to study the rich descriptions the ancient authors had left about the local peoples and institutions the Romans had created during their conquest. Throughout the eighteenth century the historical study of medieval buildings and antiquities had also increasingly been gaining appeal. In Britain their study instigated the early creation of associations such as the Society of Antiquaries of 1707, but even this early interest did not lead to medieval antiquities receiving attention in institutions such as the British Museum, where they would only receive a proper departmental status well into the nineteenth century (Smiles 2004: 176). In comparative terms, the national past and its relics were perceived by many to be of secondary rate when judged against the history and arts of the classical civilizations. During the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath, for example, the national past would not be as appreciated by as many people and antiquarians as that of the Great Civilizations (Jourdan 1996). This situation, however, started to change in the early nineteenth century. There were three key developments in this period, all inherited from Enlightenment beliefs, which were the foundation for archaeology as a source of national pride. The effects of these would be seen especially from the central decades of the century.


This diminutive manor house, famous throughout the world as the birthplace of Sir Isaac Newton, has been the subject of studied repair. It is now the property of the National Trust and only essential works connected with its maintenance and preservation have been carried out. Dating from the early seventeenth century, the house in its plan, no less than in the treatment of its external features, expresses the Cotswold tradition of masoncraft, which once extended from Gloucestershire to Lincolnshire. Built of local stone the architectural features consist of moulded window jambs and mullions, finely wrought chimney stacks and well proportioned quoins. The original lead glazing has disappeared from nearly all the main windows. Regarding the roofs the original ‘Colly Weston' stone slates are in position. Internally many of the period fittings, such as doors, cupboards and stone fireplaces, can be seen. The construction of the bedroom floors in a certain measure anticipates the reinforced concrete floor of the present day. At Woolsthorpe the floors, which measure about four and a half inches thick, are formed of reeds and mortar. After more than three hundred years of usage these floors are still free from defects. Externally, beyond very necessary repairs to the masonry of the chimney stacks, the addition of copper gutters and some minor work, nothing has been done to alter the exterior of the house. It was, however, found expedient to demolish some stone steps and an outside convenience of nineteenth-century date.


1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 45-55
Author(s):  
Herbert Sussman

In his classic study of the Gothic revival, Kenneth Clark describes the transformation of the Gothic from its eighteenth-century associations with the non-rational, the non-civilized, and the mysterious into the sacramental Gothic created in large measure by Pugin and Ruskin. This transformation of medievalism continued through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, sacramental Gothic had been subverted, changed into what Walter Pater calls in his essay “Aesthetic Poetry” a “profounder medievalism,” a medievalism that is closer in sensibility and artistic form to the contemporaneous Decadent movement on the Continent, to the work of Baudelaire and of Poe. This transformation can be illustrated in the sharp changes in the use of one of the most important signs of Victorian medievalism, the monastic or cloistered life, from the early Victorian writings of Thomas Carlyle, to the work of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolors of the late 1850s and William Morris's Defence of Guenevere volume of 1858, the original subject of Pater's essay.


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