Return of the repressed: The prima donna from Hoffmann's Tales to Offenbach's Contes

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Hadlock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
The World ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Female Singers

The operatic diva, a singer of strange songs, and too often a turbulent, unkind girl, haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, as evidenced by the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and numerous retellings of those tales in theatre, ballet and opera. Each adaptation of Hoffmann's ‘Rat Krespel’, ‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Don Juan’ reflects an ambivalent attitude towards women performers, whose potent voices make them simultaneously desirable and fearsome. How do these stories about female singers contrive to contain and manage the singing woman’s authority? And how does the prima donna's voice repeatedly make itself heard, eluding and overcoming narrative attempts to shape or contain its turbulent noise?Let me begin with an excerpt from ‘Rat Krespel’ (1818), which might serve as a parable for relationships between female singers and male music lovers in the Romantic imagination. Krespel, a young German musician, travelled in Italy and was fortunate enough to win the heart of a celebrated diva, Angela, whose name seemed only appropriate to her heavenly voice. Unfortunately, her personality was less than heavenly, and when she was not actually singing he found her violent whims and demands for attention very trying. One day, as he stood playing his violin:[Angela] embraced her husband, overwhelmed him with sweet and languishing glances, and rested her pretty head on his shoulder. But Krespel, carried away into the world of music, continued to play on until the walls echoed again; thus he chanced to touch the Signora somewhat ungently with his arm and the fiddle bow.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

As dúvidas de Kierkegaard: ou sobre o legado pedagógico do romantismo alemão

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
Jean Vargas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Belo Horizonte

Resumo: O artigo leva em conta a recepção de Kierkegaard sobre o modo como os românticos lidam com o conhecimento e argumenta que o dinamarquês tem algo a dizer sobre temáticas de educação que estão hoje na ordem do dia. O artigo mostra ainda como Kierkegaard lida com temas transdisciplinares e em que medida a herança romântica, em contraposição ao legado iluminista, o ajuda a conceber sua reflexão pedagógica e existencial.Palavras-chave: Kierkegaard. Educação. Romantismo alemão. Pedagogia. Dúvida Abstract: The article takes into account Kierkegaard's reception of how the romantics deal with knowledge and argues that the Danish has something to say about education issues that are today the order of the day. The article also shows how Kierkegaard deals with transdisciplinary themes and to what extent the romantic heritage, in contrast to the enlightened legacy, helps him to conceive his pedagogical and existential reflection. Keywords: Kierkegaard. Education. German romanticism. Pedagogy. Doubt. REFERÊNCIASBEISER, Frederick. German Idealism: The Struggle against subjectivism 1781-1801. Londres: Harvard University Press, 2002.BERLIN, Isaiah. As raízes do romantismo. São Paulo: Três Estrelas, 2015.GRAMMONT, Guiomar de. Don Juan, Fausto e o Judeu Errante em Kierkeggard. Petrópolis: Catedral das Letras, 2003.KIERKEGAARD, Søren. Johannes Clímacus ou é preciso duvidar de tudo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.KIERKEGAARD, Søren. Ponto de vista explicativo da minha obra de escritor: uma comunicação direta, relatório à História. Tradução de João Gama. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2002._______. Ou-ou: um fragmento de vida. Volume I. Tradução de Elisabete M. de Sousa. Lisboa: Relógios’d’água, 2013a._______. Pós-escrito conclusivo não científico às Migalhas filosóficas: coletânea mímico-patético-dialética, contribuição existencial, por Johannes Climacus.  Tradução de Álvaro L. M, Valls. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2013. v.1._______. Temor e Tremor. Tradução de Maria José Marinho. São Paulo: Abril cultural, 1974. (Os pensadores).LÖWITH, Karl. De Hegel à Nietzsche. Tradução de Rémi Laureillard, Paris: Gallimard, 1969.PATTINSON, George. Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004.SAFRANSKI, Rudiger. Romantismo: uma questão alemã. Tradução de Rita Rios. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2010.VALLS, Álvaro; MARTINS, Jasson. (Org.). Kierkegaard no nosso tempo. São Leopoldo: Nova Harmonia, 2010.VARGAS, Jean. Kierkegaard entre a existência e o niilismo. Puc Minas: Sapere Aude, Belo Horizonte, v.6–n.12, Jul./Dez.2015, p. 657-671.VARGAS, Jean. Indivíduo e multidão: uma reflexão sobre o lugar da ética no pensamento de Søren Kierkegaard. UFMG: Outramargem, Belo Horizonte, V.  - n., 2 Semestre 2014, p. 99-109.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

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