The development of a modern prose style in Arabic literature

1989 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Cachia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Consummate Skill

The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education, and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters—poets and prose writers alike—it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of Rhetoric known as badī, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices2 (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

Studies in Contemporary Arabic Literature

1929 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-322
Author(s):  
H. A. R. Gibb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

In the preceding survey of Arabic literature during the nineteenth century, special emphasis was deliberately laid on two aspects of the subject, the struggle between the old and the new conceptions and ideals, and the gradual emergence of a. simplified Arabic prose style. If it is asked why a point of view apparently so narrow and exclusive should have been adopted, to the prejudice of a more detailed investigation of the personal and literary characteristics of the individual writers, the answer is twofold.

Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-371
Author(s):  
Irena Yamboliev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Sentence Level

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

scholarly journals The spaces of truth and cathedral window light

Literator ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
G. Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Western Development ◽  
Permanent Loss ◽  
The Church ◽  
Complex Expression

Major writers and painters of the Romantic period interpreted the church or cathedral in its organic and spiritual dimensions as a complex expression of a matured Christian civilization. Artists of the mid-nineteenth century continued to produce both secular and religious variations upon this established referentiality. Although divergent uses reciprocally reinforced the fascination for the central imagery of the church and its multiple contexts, they also came to suggest a deeper tension in Western development between what the church had meant in an earlier Europe and what it might mean for late modernity. The threat of a permanent loss of cultural values was an issue haunting Realist approaches. A crucial revision occurred when key Symbolist poets openly revived the first Romantic themes but treated them as contents available to a decidedly post-Romantic historical consciousness. There was an analogous revival of interest in the church as a culturally charged symbol in painting around the turn of the century. Although they might apply this poetic and pictorial heritage in strikingly different ways, writers of high Modernism such as Rilke, Proust, and Kafka understood its richness and importance.

scholarly journals In-Law and Mate Preferences in Chinese Society and the Role of Traditional Cultural Values

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 147470491773051 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingke Guo ◽  
Yujie Li ◽  
Shushuang Yu
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Filial Piety ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Parental Influence ◽  
Mate Preferences ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Genetic Quality ◽  
Parental Preferences ◽  
Parent Child

Using 347 parent–child dyads as participants, this study directly examined in-law and mate preferences in a typical collectivist culture. The results showed (1) traits indicating social status and parental investment were more highly valued by the parents, while traits indicating genetic quality and traits related to romantic love were more highly valued by the children. (2) Parental preferences were moderated by gender of the in-laws. Good earning capacity was more preferred by parents in a son-in-law, traits connoting genetic quality and reproductive fitness were more preferred by parents in a daughter-in-law. (3) There was more convergence in in-law and mate preferences in Chinese culture than in Western cultures. (4) Traditional cultural values (i.e., filial piety) can be used as a predictor of traditional mate preferences and less parent–child divergences. Additionally, greater preference for kind and understanding by parents than by children as well as by daughters than by sons, and greater preference for social status by the daughters’ than by the sons’ parents have not been observed in the rating and the ranking instrument. These findings illustrated how culture handles the parent–child disagreement over mating by authorizing greater parental influence on children’s mating decisions.

Food of the Woods and Plains

Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Wild Rice ◽  
Maple Syrup ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
Local Ecology ◽  
European Agriculture

The chapter is comparative, exploring how Erdrich’s Birchbark series offers a counternarrative to Wilder’s Little House books through Ojibwe food and foodways. It showcases the competing cultural values of the two nineteenth-century families in the stories as well as those of their twentieth-century writers. Wilder chronicles the transplantation of European methods of agriculture into the American Midwest with its attendant restructuring of the environment. Erdrich’s Birchbark series works as a challenging counter-history to Wilder’s colonialist affirmation and depicts a people whose foodways have long worked in concert with their local ecology (as the author’s research into Ojibwe practices of cultivating wild rice and, maple syrup, and berrying, as well as buffalo hunting, made clear.) Through food, Erdrich remaps the region, recreating it as it was before the invasion of European agriculture, producing a richer comprehension of the region’s food and foodways than Wilder’s pioneer vision.

scholarly journals Men and Place: Male Identity and the Meaning of Place in the Nineteenth-Century Scottish Gàidhealtachd

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Home Country ◽  
International Mobility ◽  
Male Identity ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
Professional Success

The perfunctory noting of name, dates, family relationships and a location on gravestones initially suggests that such details are unprofitable sources for evidence of male identity. However the sheer commonplaceness of stating a placename, particularly when it is noticeably associated with men rather than women, and when not all cultures do the same, indicates that it may reveal something of how men thought of themselves and how they felt. Canadian and Australian studies have suggested that recording placenames on a headstone was a marker of Scottish ethnicity, like an image of a thistle. However, in the nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands ethnicity was not a key component of identity. Indications of place, at least in the ‘home’ country, must therefore signify a different element of identity. This article examines headstone inscriptions of men from across the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands of Scotland who died in the nineteenth century. The resulting evidence indicates that place was a significant element of male identity, indicating personal or ancestral connection with a particular location; a regional affiliation; professional success; social status; national and international mobility; an imperial or patriotic mindset; or even geographical dislocation. In short, place was highly significant to nineteenth-century Highland men, and was a key element of their personal identity.

“A Manifestation of a Deep, Inborn Inherited Instinct”: Modernist Aesthetics and the Instabilities of Inheritance in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Evelyn T.Y. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Familial Inheritance ◽  
Modern Self ◽  
Century Literature

This essay explores how Joseph Conrad reworks the trope of inheritance—traditionally considered relevant for earlier nineteenth-century literature rather than Modernism—in expressing Jim’s crisis of self-making in Lord Jim. Conrad moves away from the conventional emphasis on familial inheritance of social status and wealth to focus on inherited abilities, which Jim tries to prove in building his heroic and gentlemanly status. However, there are limits to this process of self-creation: inheritance is, as the word’s root suggests, innate to oneself, yet can also be extrinsic since it still needs to be expressed to call it one’s own, and be unstable since it is open to interpretation. Such complexities in the notion of inheritance, the essay argues, contribute to a modernist aesthetics in the novel that simultaneously harbours continuity (such as gradualism, predictability, and succession) and discontinuity (such as narrative rupture and the breakdown of causality), allowing the perils of modern self-making to be more fully revealed.

Continuities of Social Mobility in Traditional and Modern Society in India: Two Case Studies of Caste Mobility in Bengal

1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hitesranjan Sanyal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The People ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Corporate Social ◽  
Ownership Of Land

The Sadgapas and the Tilis, two Bengali castes broke with their parent castes. They formed themselves into new castes which gained higher social status than their parent castes in terms of the local caste hierarchy in Bangal. The emergence of the Sadgopa caste, as distinct from the Tilis, occurred at a period when none of the technological, political, and intellectual developments had yet occurred in Bengal that are generally used to characterize modernization. They were established as a caste by the second decade of the nineteenth century while the history of their growth and development goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Tili movement took an extensive form in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Tilis receives wider social recognition as a caste during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. The Tili movement was accelerated by modern conditions. Apparently the external factors helping social mobility varied from the case of the Sadgopas to that of the Tilis. But there are certain common features of development in both cases. Both the Sadgopas and the Tilis had collectively abandoned their traditional occupation to switch over to comparatively more lucrative and prestigious occupations, and became landowners. Complete dissociation from the traditional occupations which identified them with lower social ranks made it easier for the Sadgopas and the Tilis to aspire for better social status. But the crucial factor in their movements for mobility was ownership of land, which enabled them to have direct control over the life of the people in their respective areas and enhance their social prestige and power. This was the source of their strength as distinct groups and die source of their collective power to bargain successfully with the rest of the society for higher status. The incentive of corporate social mobility originated, both under traditional, pre-modern circumstances and under the circumstances of modernization, from the achievement of each group of a sense of corporate solidarity, regarding internal as well as external prestige. This enabled the groups to break away from the parent castes and to form new castes with higher social status. Previous writing on the subject has made this corporate solidarity a function of response to external forces, which are identified with only factors of modernization. It is the contention of this paper that corporate solidarity could have had its genesis in prcmodern times as well and that modernization marked only its acceleration.

XIV. The Social Status of Chaucer's Franklin

PMLA ◽  
1926 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Hall Gerould
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The Social ◽  
Edward Iii ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject

An uncertainty as to the social position of franklins in general, and of Chaucer's Franklin in particular, has occasionally manifested itself since the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1810, Todd quoted an elaborate note from Waterhous's Commentary on Sir John Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum Angliae, which tended to show that franklins did not belong to the gentry. Todd was unable to square this with the fact that (Chaucer's Franklin was “at sessiouns,” since by a statute of Edward III, which he cited, justices were seigneurs, and that he was “ofte tyme” a knight of the shire, since by another statute members of parliament were “chivalers et serjantz des meulz vaues du paies.”) Todd was thus left in doubt as to the gentility of the Franklin. As a later examination of Fortescue's remarks will show, it is not he but his commentator who must be blamed for lowering the status of Chaucer's sanguine country gentleman. If Todd had been of firmer mind, or if he had studied the subject more deeply, he would not have left the matter in doubt—a trap for unwary feet in later times.

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