Breaking Out: The English Assimilation of Continental Thought in Nineteenth-Century Rome

1984 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Robert O. Preyer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Fluid Medium ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Continental Thought ◽  
Anglo American

Rome was central to the Anglo-American imagination; for Isabel Archer “in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective.… Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater.” James here records (in the preterit tense) an occurrence which can be recovered from the past definite and replicated in the present and future progressive tenses – Isabel needs only to position herself before the “large Roman record” and the experience of soothing Time, Time as continuum, becomes a possibility once again. This replicable consciousness may be further specified “how it feels when one is in the happening of experiencing Time as the fluid medium of all lived experience.” Rome occasions the consciousness of an alternative time sense, one which might lighten the burden of living within a deterministic temporal dimension where past actions condition present and future actions to such an extent that one feels hopelessly locked into an imprisoning narrative pattern of before and after, cause and effect. James obviously believed that such temporal epiphanies offered root room for the psyche, a possibility of returning to the actual with renewed or composed psychic energies. (Other interpretations were, of course, possible-the complacent and self-satisfied traveller was often troubled by this extension of consciousness.) However interpreted, one finds this shock of recognition everywhere – in Canto 4 of Childe Harold, in The Education of Henry Adams, in Middlemarch and Romola, The Marble Faun, in the verse of all the major poets from Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley through both Brownings, Rogers, and Tennyson, in The Stones of Venice, Dipsychus, Amours de Voyage, and dimly in Rienzi and The Last Days of Pompeii, not to mention Harriet Beecher Stowe's less-than-immortal Agnes of Sorrento.

“The Church of Humanity”: New York's Worshipping Positivists

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Church

The philosophy of Auguste Comte changed irrevocably the intellectual contours of nineteenth-century Europe. In the Anglo-American world, John Stuart Mill was profoundly influenced by Comte's magisterial Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and Mill's work became an important conduit through which Americans such as John Fiske, Lester F. Ward and Henry Adams encountered positivism. Comte's controversial later work (especially the Systéme de politique positive [1851–1854]) was also significant, although Mill and others became harsh critics of the so-called ‘second system.’ English admirers of Comte's bizarre social and religious blueprint did include notables, however, such as Frederic Harrison, Harriet Martineau and novelist George Eliot1.

Companionate Marriage across the Century’s Turn

2018 ◽  
pp. 175-198
Author(s):  
Melanie V. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Attitudes Toward Marriage ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
Cautionary Tales ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The struggle to realize companionate marriage appears as a central conflict in literary works by Anglo-American, African American, and ethnic American writers, who grapple with the issues raised by new ideologies and cultures of marriage. Drawing from cultural history that includes Lindsey and Evans’s volume, The Companionate Marriage (1927), and responses to it as well as a range of literary marriages that demonstrate the power of the companionate ideal, this piece charts the interaction between changing attitudes toward marriage in life and literature. As the range and complexity of opinions circulating around this issue demonstrate, the ostensibly “modern” question of equality in marriage had been debated as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. By contrast, later, more modern narratives increasingly turn to depictions of non-companionate, patriarchal arrangements, which offer both cautionary tales about the past and counter a trenchant idealism about the companionate model.

Performance, Theater, Drama

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kastleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Performance Theater

Abstract This year saw the continued expansion of four vibrant conversations within the field of theater and performance studies. The first section of this review, ‘World Stages and Their Borders’, features scholarship that explores how theaters represent worlds beyond the nation’s territorial and symbolic boundaries. The second section, ‘Performing Critical Temporalities’, considers studies of minoritarian performance that engage with the lived experience of time. In the third section, ‘Theater After Liveness’, I discuss scholarship on modern drama that is in dialogue with theories of performance as a live event. A fourth section considers new works on the nineteenth-century theater, showing how ‘Celebrity, Publicity, and Amateurism’ are entwined. Finally, a brief concluding note outlines significant biographies and reference works released within the past year.

Disarticulate—Repurpose—Disrupt: Art/Archaeology

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The Past ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Colonialism

This project sees archaeology and art as a political tool for disrupting conventional, politically loaded narratives of the past. Rather than producing institutionally safe narratives conventionally certified as truth, archaeologists should follow the lead of artists who use the past as a source of materials to be reconfigured in new ways to help people see in new ways. Using as an example the works of the Canadian artist Ken Monkman, who subverts nineteenth- century landscape painting to reinsert the missing critiques of Anglo-American colonialism, dominance of nature, and heteronormativity, this paper advocates disarticulating materials from the past by severing them from their context, repurposing them to bring contemporary concerns to the fore and creating new, disruptive visions from them. The article proposes the practice of an art/archaeology.

Suspended States in the Long Caribbean, 1791–1861

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-144
Author(s):  
Edward Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Suspended State ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Political Time ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Benito Cereno

This chapter examines the suspended state between colonial slavery and postcolonial independence in the “long Caribbean.” Involving the Caribbean, especially Haiti, and other equivalent experiments in black self-rule in Sierra Leone and Liberia, this incomplete transition from slavery to freedom challenged progressivist accounts of a world tending ever closer to emancipation. Instead, it seemed that history had come to an unexpected halt. As such, many individuals conceived of the citizen and sovereign in static terms and grappled with a form of paused political time in which history appeared to have stopped. The “black counterfactual,” which includes “Benito Cereno,” “The Heroic Slave,” Blake; or, The Huts of America, Liberia, and the first Haitian novel, Stella, emerged from this world. This genre, which considered the perils and possibilities of black self-rule and freedom, attempted to imagine the black state into existence. It aimed to intervene in the past to create a cause-and-effect chain of events that would inevitably lead to a better world. However, these fictions found narrative to be every bit as recalcitrant as the long Caribbean world itself. Overall, this chapter challenges a redemptionist note of black historiography, in which eventual liberation orients racial struggles in the nineteenth century.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

The Blue Flower and the Account Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Anne F. Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
Racial Category ◽  
North American West ◽  
Mixed Blood ◽  
Anglo American

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.

Enlightening Symbols

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Mazur
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Number System ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Mathematical Notation ◽  
Rhetorical Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mathematical Symbols ◽  
Before And After ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Different Cultures

While all of us regularly use basic mathematical symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we know today? This book explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. It shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted. Traversing mathematical history and the foundations of numerals in different cultures, the book looks at how historians have disagreed over the origins of the number system for the past two centuries. It follows the transfigurations of algebra from a rhetorical style to a symbolic one, demonstrating that most algebra before the sixteenth century was written in prose or in verse employing the written names of numerals. It also investigates the subconscious and psychological effects that mathematical symbols have had on mathematical thought, moods, meaning, communication, and comprehension. It considers how these symbols influence us (through similarity, association, identity, resemblance, and repeated imagery), how they lead to new ideas by subconscious associations, how they make connections between experience and the unknown, and how they contribute to the communication of basic mathematics. From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book shows how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Franko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
World War ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Critical Discourses

This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905–1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses analyzed indulged in flights of poetic fancy a distinction is made between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947–1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar’s collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. The discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; then track the baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.

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