scholarly journals ‘Padres de la Patria’ and the Ancestral Past: Commemorations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-805 ◽  
Author(s):  
REBECCA EARLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Indigenous Culture ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Shed Light

This article examines the civic festivals held in nineteenth-century Spanish America to commemorate independence from Spain. Through such festivals political leaders hoped, in Hobsbawm's words, ‘to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’. But when did the ‘past’ begin? If in nineteenth-century France the French Revolution was the time of history, in Spanish America there was no consensus on when history began. The debates about national origins embedded within the nineteenth-century civic festival not only suggest how political elites viewed their Patrias but also shed light on the position of indigenous culture (usually separated hygienically from indigenous peoples themselves) within the developing national histories of post-independence Spanish America.

The Music Behind the Mask: Rossini’s Uncanny Salon

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Simon Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
A Site ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Shed Light

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In these works, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” This paper establishes how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a musical “exhumation,” with his compositional activities functioning as a site for broader discourses about disease, aging, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex shed light on changing attitudes toward the composer, which coincided with broader aesthetic shifts taking place at the time. The tensions engendered by Rossini’s precarious status as both living and dead, and his nostalgic relationship to the past, constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential that has not yet been duly acknowledged.

The Glut of Doctors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The West ◽  
Professional Careers ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Attraction ◽  
The French Revolution

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.

Antarctic Archaeology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Zarankin ◽  
Melisa A. Salerno
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Shetland Islands ◽  
Shetland Islands ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Over Time

Antarctica was the last continent to be known. Human encounters with the region acquired different characteristics over time. Within the framework of dominant narratives, the early ‘exploitation’ of the territory was given less attention than late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘exploration’. Nineteenth-century exploitation was especially associated with sealing on the South Shetland Islands. Dominant narratives on the period refer to the captains of sealing vessels, the discovery of geographical features, the volume of resources obtained. However, they do not consider the life of the ordinary sealers who lived and worked on the islands. This chapter aims to show the power of archaeology to shed light on these ‘invisible people’ and their forgotten stories. It holds that archaeology offers a possibility for reimagining the past of Antarctica, calling for a revision of traditional narratives.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
George Sand ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Historical Agency ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Autoexoticism with Promotional Purposes? Samuel-Henri Berthoud and Provincial Literary Ruse in Nineteenth-Century France

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Gosetti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The North ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Incomplete Picture ◽  
Shed Light

“There speaks the provincial!”—Goncharov, The Same Old StoryIn nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Echoes of the Guillotine: Berlioz and the French Fantastic

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-185
Author(s):  
Marianna Ritchey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Important Contributor ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The Many

Abstract The fantastic, theorized as an expression of the anxieties, fears, and political beliefs of the generation of young French writers born in the decades directly following the Revolution and Terror, has long been viewed primarily as a literary genre. Observed in light of this artistic movement, Berlioz's most famous work, Symphonie fantastique, emerges as a musical manifestation of fantastic techniques, and Berlioz himself as an important contributor to the Fantastic culture that swept nineteenth-century France. Using Tzvetan Todorov's narrative theory, I identify two techniques fantastic authors exploit that are most useful in understanding Symphonie Fantastique: an intentional ambiguity of form, and a privileging of ambiguous ““thresholds”” over teleological plot resolution. In pursuing a new explanation of the symphony's strange deviations from musical norms, I highlight the many different ways the symphony has been understood and analyzed by prominent musicologists over the past 180 years. By now, musicologists have effectively demonstrated that Berlioz was not the ““incompetent genius”” (in Charles Rosen's wry formulation) he was long considered to be; however, the fact that there is still disagreement and debate over Symphonie Fantastique's deviations from normative form and content, as well as what those deviations might mean, demonstrates the highly fraught signifying structure of the music. Locating the symphony's use of fantastic tropes and techniques demonstrates that many of its strangest aspects——those ““failures”” that have been the subject of musicological debate since 1835——come into focus when we take its title seriously and regard the work as a symphony in the fantastic genre.

POLITICAL CULTURE, POLITICAL CLASS, AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-315
Author(s):  
D. L. L. PARRY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Community ◽  
French History ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
The French Revolution

The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited by Isser Woloch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Mona Ozouf et al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political culture, and by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather than through l'histoire événementielle of ministries and elections. The three books reviewed here all relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly in The past in French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon, artistic culture was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe was left to nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom. Yet whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make only passing references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary adjuncts to such an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which enables one to put l'histoire événementielle aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within the political class. The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures. What, though, creates these communities?

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
French Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National System ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

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