The Twilight of Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Weston, and the End of Nineteenth-Century Literary Nature

Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 347-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph F. Bogardus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Thomas Eakins ◽  
Georgia O'keeffe

That there is a striking correspondence between the thinking of such A nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and that of the twentieth-century American master of photography Edward Weston should come as no great surprise, for it is widely recognized that transcendentalism has been an essential ingredient in the lives and work of numerous major American artists. During the nineteenth century, this influence was most fully expressed by poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, by the painter Thomas Eakins, and by the architect Louis Sullivan. At the turn of the century, the composer Charles Ives and painters Robert Henri and his “Ashcan” colleagues John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn continued to draw sustenance from the ideas and example of the transcendentalists. And during the early twentieth century, the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the gifted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and major poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams made clear through their work the looming presence of the transcendentalist tradition. Thus, well before the 1920s, when Edward Weston began making his most innovative photographs, transcendentalism consciously and unconsciously pervaded American intellectual and artistic life: It was something to absorb or reject-or both. “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law,” was how Eliot put it. Weston was not exempt from this law.

Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Leadership ◽  
Local Leaders

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.

scholarly journals Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 235-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimena Canales ◽  
Andrew Herscher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
International Style

Adolf Loos’s famous essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’, decisively linked unornamented architecture with the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay’s force comes from arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology. Nevertheless, Loos’s work has been consistently understood only within the context of the inter-war avant- gardes. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier was particularly enthusiastic in bringing Loos’s work to the fore, thereby establishing its future reception. ‘Ornament and Crime’ became an essential catalyst for architecture’s conversion away from the historicism of the nineteenth century to modernism. At the turn of the century, Loos’s essay already foreshadowed the white abstraction of ‘less is more’ architecture and the functionalist rigour of the International Style which would dominate the twentieth century.

Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism

This book presents innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The United States ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Oriental Mysticism

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.

Fashioning the Imperial Self

Black Land ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Nadia Nurhussein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Turn Of The Century

This chapter introduces three incidents of Ethiopianist aristocratic impersonation or imposture. First is of Isaac Brown, a Jamaican man who successfully passed himself off as Menelik's nephew at the turn of the century. Second is that of Joseph Emanuel Blayechettai, who in the 1920s claimed to be the kidnapped son of a king of Tigre, an Abyssinian province. Then third is that of Virginia Woolf, whose participation in the Dreadnought hoax in 1910, during which she dressed as an Abyssinian prince, was notorious. The impersonations are dramatic illustrations of spectacular Ethiopianism, a variant especially prevalent in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The performances of spectacular Ethiopianism were preceded in the nineteenth century by the reciprocal costuming of Prince Alemayehu, the son of Emperor Tewodros orphaned by the Anglo-Abyssinian War, and his guardian, the eccentric English explorer Captain Tristram Speedy.

Dante and the Performing Arts

2021 ◽  
pp. 601-618
Author(s):  
Rossend Arqués Corominas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Vita Nuova

This chapter explores the reception of Dante in the performing arts, especially the Commedia. The first part outlines public readings of Dante, from Boccaccio to the present day (Benigni, Bene, etc.) via fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence. It also revisits Gustavo Modena and other nineteenth-century patriotic actors. The second part offers a chronology of the presence of Dante’s work in the theatrical field in three periods: the nineteenth century with Francesca da Rimini and some other characters from the Commedia who occupy a prominent place in the theatre scene and European opera—especially in works by Pellico and D’Annunzio; the turn of the century, when the pre-Raphaelite and symbolist Beatrice from Vita nuova gains more prominence; and the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, with a focus on dance, music, and theatre.

Sovereignty beyond the West: The End of Classical International Law

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnulf Becker Lorca
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Community ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Post War

AbstractThe historical processes through which international law became, conceptually, a universal legal order and, geographically, an order with a global scope of validity, are long and complex. These transformations, which began to appear during the second half of the nineteenth century, did not end until post-War-World-II decolonization. This article examines one particular aspect of these transformations: once non-Western states were admitted and begun to participate in the international community, did the rules of international law governing the interaction between Western and non-Western States change? What did it mean for semi-peripheral states to acquire sovereignty? The article argues that during the first decades of the twentieth century, semi-peripheral lawyers realized that sovereignty, so longed-for during the nineteenth century, conferred, under classical international law, much less autonomy and equality than they had anticipated. Moreover, at the turn of the century, the specific challenges faced by semi-peripheral states in their interaction with Western powers shifted, so that classical international law exhausted its power and stopped being useful. The article thus offers, from the perspective of the semi-periphery, an explanation of the shift from classical to modern international law.

The Mansana Collection. A Treasury of Japanese Art in Barcelona at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-209
Author(s):  
Ricard Bru
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Japanese Art ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract Josep Mansana Dordan, a well-known Catalan late-nineteenth-century businessman, founded what is considered the finest collection of Japanese art established in Catalonia and in Spain at the turn of the century. In the early twentieth century, the Mansana Collection, as it was known, enjoyed popularity and prestige in Barcelona thanks to its constant expansion driven by the founder’s son, Josep Mansana Terrés, also an entrepreneur. The collection was well known at the time, but fell into oblivion after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It was not until 2013 that, on the occasion of the exhibition Japonisme. La fascinació per l’art japonès, the collection began to be rediscovered and studied. This article aims to present a first complete overview of the history and characteristics of the old Mansana Collection and its impact on Barcelona at and immediately after the turn of the twentieth century.

Gardening in the Apocalypse

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-517
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Robert Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
To Come

The “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago struck many Americans as a hopeful glimmer of the happy cities to come, but soon, visions of even happier utopian suburbs reclaimed dominance, asserting the need for “A Cityless and Countryless World.” When Bellamy produced his sequel to Looking Backward, it promised a future of commuting by motorcar and personal aircraft to and from cottages in garden suburbs. In different ways, influential reformers and architects such as Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright fed their readings of utopian literature into influential designs for destroying old cities and achieving suburban bliss. The last great nineteenth-century utopian visionary was also the greatest science-fiction author of the early twentieth century: H. G. Wells. He, perhaps more than any other writer, carried forward the Victorian call to abandon Babylon to new heights and fresh audiences, prophesying dreadful apocalypse, and luminously modern gardens to follow.

Fashioning Modernity: Elite Dressmaking in Barcelona c. 1870–1919

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-243
Author(s):  
Laura Casal-Valls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Substantial Change

Late nineteenth-century fashion in Barcelona is examined through the development of the dressmaker’s craft, taking account of the historical context and changes in society at the turn of the century. Analysis of the production process, surviving garments and archival evidence demonstrates that a substantial change took place in the organization of the dressmaking industry in Barcelona in the late nineteenth century. This included the insertion of dressmakers’ labels in the most technically and stylistically sophisticated garments, signalling an increasing recognition of leading dressmakers — a process similar to that found in French couture. Juana Valls has been identified as a key designer who, although almost unknown today, was highly successful and prominent at the turn of the twentieth century; a brief biography of Valls is developed. Finally, following this evolutionary period, the year 1919 is proposed as a turning point for Catalan and Spanish couture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document