Culture and musical hermeneutics: The Salome complex

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer

From Flaubert to Richard Strauss, male artists in late nineteenth-century Europe were fascinated by the figure of Salome. This fascination, indeed, amounted to a genuine craze. One representation sparked another: J.-K. Huysmans fantasised about paintings by Gustave Moreau; Oscar Wilde expanded on Huysmans; Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Wilde. Fine editions of Wilde's Salome with Beardsley's illustrations remained cult objects well into the twentieth century. In general, the Salome craze, like the science and medicine of its day, sought to legitimise new forms of control by men over the bodies and behaviour of women. The present paper revisits this well-known episode in cultural history with two distinct aims in mind, one interpretative, the other methodological. The interpretative aim is to offer a feminist approach to the fin-de-sièclecompulsion to retell the Salome story with lavish attention to misogynist imagery - those quivering female bodies and gory male heads. The methodological aim is to find a meeting ground for literary criticism and musicology as both disciplines aspire to become vehicles of a more comprehensive criticism of culture.

Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.


1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN LESTER

Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century.Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.


2018 ◽  
pp. 94-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kama Maclean

This chapter discusses the racist environment in late nineteenth-century Australia which resulted in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 designed to prohibit entry of non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth. The chapter discusses the evolution of various collective terms like ‘alien’, ‘coolie’ or ‘Hindoo’ to identify Indians as the ‘other’ of the national community. From biographical details and photographs in the Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs), which monitored the movement and identities of non-white residents, the chapter reveals how many Indians had undergone a change of name during immigration, an important marker of individual identity. The chapter argues that the most commonly ascribed name ‘Charlie’, was a means of ‘infantilizing and subordinating’ Indian migrants. The CEDT images of migrants in Indian clothes and identified with their new names are seen as locating Indian settlers in early twentieth-century Australia in a position of subordination within the colonial social hierarchy.


ILR Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Eichengreen

This paper presents an analysis of data on male workers taken from an 1894 survey of the Iowa labor market. Consistent with the results of earlier research by Paul Douglas, the author finds evidence of a statistically significant and economically important union earnings premium. The analysis also shows that late nineteenth-century unionism, like unionism in the twentieth century, tended to reduce wage dispersion. On the other hand, the author finds no evidence that late nineteenth-century unions reduced the length of the workday for union members compared to nonunion workers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Reenan ◽  
Richard Bass

The expression P3,0refers to one class of parsimonious voice-leading transformations between seventh chords introduced in a 1998 article by Jack Douthett and Peter Steinbach as Pm,n(Journal of Music Theory42 (2): 241–63). In addition to tones that may be held in common, the subscripts indicate the number of voices that move by half step (m) or whole step (n) in connecting one seventh chord to the next. P3,0designates a transformation in which one of the chord members is held in common while each of the other three moves by half step. P3,0transformations produce some of the most striking chromatic harmonic progressions in the late Romantic repertoire. This study focuses on aspects of P3,0transformations that include 1) their place in the broader context of neo-Riemannian voice-leading transformations; 2) their properties and a specific means of notating all possible P3,0types; 3) explications of how the various types are integrated within late nineteenth-century harmonic practice and interact with traditional tonal harmony; and 4) analytic applications that demonstrate how P3,0transformations operate within and contribute to musical structure, including the opening of the Prelude to Wagner’sTristan und Isolde, and a complete song (“Ruhe, meine Seele!” op. 27 no. 1) by Richard Strauss.


Author(s):  
Meredith L. Goldsmith

Chapter 8 responds to two prevailing arguments about the fiction of Jessie Fauset—the one labeling her work retrograde, the other regarding it as subtly subversive—by viewing the writer’s work as part of a history of long nineteenth-century representation. Countering the dominant perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a break from the past—a view that has shunted Fauset’s work to the sidelines—the essay argues that Fauset’s work explores the legacy of late-nineteenth-century US culture in the emergent modernity of the early twentieth century. Excavating the literary, cultural, and scientific tropes of feminine representation that burst from the pages of Fauset’s fiction, the essay identifies a recent literary past that informs Fauset’s constructions of her modern urban heroines.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Doylen

THE TRIALS OF OSCAR WILDE for acts of “gross indecency” not only confirmed him as “the sexual deviant for the late nineteenth century” but also made him “the paradigmatic example for an emerging public definition of a new ‘type’ of male sexual actor: ‘the homosexual’” (Cohen 1–2). Given that De Profundis is the only major prose work that Wilde wrote on the other side of the scandals prompted by his 1895 trials,1 it is surprising that this text has received little serious consideration from scholars in gay male studies. To be sure, Wilde’s nonfiction prose and critical dialogues generally have not received the critical attention they deserve. But the neglect of De Profundis by gay male scholarship specifically is probably due less to the text’s marginal generic status than to the feeling that De Profundis betrays the iconoclastic image of Wilde dear to the hearts of twentieth-century gay men. In his letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde seems so — one almost hesitates to say it — sincere. Indeed, for critics such as Jonathan Dollimore, Wilde’s semblance of sincerity signifies a capitulation to the middle-class morality he otherwise resisted. De Profundis thus comes to mark a decisive break in Wilde’s oeuvre and to signal the end of his self-fashioning activities (95–98). However, the view that De Profundis represents Wilde’s sincere contrition does not originate with gay male studies but was, in fact, a popular response to the text upon its initial publication in 1905.


1970 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Mattias Bäckström

“Know thyself”: this antique aphorism was re-actualised in the late nineteenth century as a credo for the museums of cultural history in Scandinavia. In this essay, this aphorism will be explored in close relation to the concept of hembygd. It is argued that these two concepts were intertwined into a foundation for an organic knowledge theory, which was in turn spread to a political nationalistic sphere and into the planning of a national unitary school for all classes in Sweden. In the early twentieth century, the museum curator and elementary school inspector Theodor Hellman formulated his concept of hembygd. Through his contemporary, the philosopher Hans Larsson, the concept will be presented as an intuitive whole, i.e. as a higher poetic order of knowledge in which thought intertwines with feeling. I argue that Hellman in his hembygd reworked Larsson’s idea of ‘intuition’ to a nationalistic essence. This hembygd took the Swedish people back home to a true sense of reality, to its national roots, and to an organic understanding of its place in history and society. Also, to attain scholarly legitimacy, the concept of hembygd was blended with general aspects of Cultural Darwinism to a cocktail of idealism and naturalism. As such an essence, hembygd was fundamental for the heritage institutions established in Härnösand after the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian Union in 1905. 


1993 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Brush

Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), the most prominent cultural historian in late-nineteenth-century Germany, has not figured in the annals of art history. Remembered principally as the author of the Deutsche Geschichte (1891–1909) and three-volume Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (1885–86), Lamprecht and his scholarly writings have been studied exclusively by historians. In his own day, however, Lamprecht made considerable forays into art history while constructing the theoretical scaffolding for his cultural historical program. He undertook these art historical studies during the 1880s—remarkably, the very years in which art history was first being shaped as a discipline at German universities. Though Lamprecht scholars have long acknowledged the art historical component in his Kulturgeschichte, they have not considered that Lamprecht's art historical endeavors may have affected the professional development of art history. Art historians, on the other hand, have forgotten Lamprecht's art historical work, associating cultural history in the second half of the nineteenth century almost exclusively with the towering figure of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Yet close study of Lamprecht's art historical publications and of related archival materials suggests that Lamprecht's vision, in the 1880s, of an interactive dynamics between art and culture had a formative impact on art history comparable to that of his older contemporary Burckhardt. In certain respects it may have been more directly relevant for art history's later development.


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