scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-94
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Continuous Sequence ◽  
Antecedent Condition ◽  
British Culture

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

Between the Alternate and the Apocryphal

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-138
Author(s):  
Derek J. Thiess
Keyword(s):  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National History ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Material History

This chapter explores connections between two treatments of history in science fictional literature—the apocryphal history and the alternate history—as they deal with material place. Theorists (Jameson, Hughes-Warrington) have explored the role of materialist history in our need to create counterfactuals by examining the cityscapes and structures in literary representations of the past. This essay connects the disparate strands of materialism, place, and religious revisionism via Juan Miguel Aguilera’s La locura de Dios. It reads the novel as both an apocryphal adventure to a “lost world” civilization and an alternate narrative of Spanish national history. La locura comments surprisingly self-consciously on the crystalline fragility of the logic holding material history together, threatened as it is by a revisionist, escapist orthodoxy.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

scholarly journals Politicking Ayurvedic Education

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 298-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Cerulli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South India ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indian Medical ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethnographic Data

AbstractAs the Indian population’s interest in biomedicine increased at the end of the nineteenth century, public confidence in India’s indigenous medicines flagged. Physicians of Ayurveda and officials of Indian medical organizations responded with discussions about and plans for reconfiguring the āyurveda (“life science”) of the Sanskrit medical classics of Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbhaṭa to be compatible with the anatomical, physiological, and pharmacological frameworks of biomedicine. This article considers some of the negotiations that shaped Ayurveda in late colonial and postcolonial India, paying special attention to how these debates affected the history of ayurvedic education. Reflecting on how the presence of biomedicine in India prompted ayurvedic practitioners to reimagine the history of their profession, it examines the revitalization of Ayurveda through the reinvention of ayurvedic education. It probes the historical move away from the gurukula as the seat of education and the institutionalization and standardization of education in the ayurvedic college. The historical record is expanded periodically with ethnographic data collected at gurukulas in South India to offer contemporary views on changes in ayurvedic education over the past 130 years.1

Military Professionalism in a Colonial Context: The Madras Army circa 1832

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo M. Crowell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Professional Standards ◽  
The Past ◽  
Military Forces ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Military Professionalism

Was the Madras Army professional in the 1830s? The answer depends largely upon the definition of professionalism. Professional standards in society at large and in military forces have changed over the past two hundred years. Major political decisions with enormous social and economic consequences are made by governments today based upon their understanding of military professionalism. This understanding should incorporate the historical record including nineteenth-century developments outside of Europe.

scholarly journals AN ASSESSMENT OF GLOBALIZATION IMPACT OF THE INDIAN CAPITAL MARKET: A REVIEW

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (10) ◽  
pp. 107-110
Author(s):  
Mamta Panwar ◽  
L. N. Arya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Market ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Administrative Power ◽  
Major Market ◽  
Board Capital ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Related Association

The forward and in reverse advancement of general capital since the nineteenth century exhibits the reiterating burdens, furthermore elective points of view from which policymakers have attempted to oppose them. This paper is centered around reporting these movements quantitatively and clarifying them. Cash related hypothesis and fiscal history together can give gainful experiences into occasions of the past and pass on associated lessons for the present. We battle that theories of how across the board capital flexibility has made must be comprehended inside the structure of the key method tritoma obliging an open economy's decision of money related association. Different stunning practices won in the major market to draw in retail cash related experts and the high cost of new issues. In spite of the fact that reliably, number of affiliations had developed, offering arranged sorts of associations as for the novel issues of capital, their exercises were not controlled by any administrative power. The issues were widely more exceptional in the optional market. The general working of the stock trade was not sufficient. The trades were controlled by their inner bye laws and managed by the addressing bodies, which were overwhelmed by picked part administrators. Exchanging individuals did not have enough progress.

Mrs Musgrave’s stain of madness: Marsh and the female offender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Höglund
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Offender ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
British Culture

This chapter ties Richard Marsh’s Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband (1895) to the anxiety surrounding the degeneration debate. Simultaneously crime novel, detective novel and Gothic fiction, Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband mobilises the discourses of eugenics and criminal anthropology as they were articulated by figures such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso. The chapter argues that the novel provides a unique contribution to the debate surrounding hereditary criminality by simultaneously and deliberately validating and critiquing the racist and sexist matrix that arguably informed late-nineteenth-century British culture and society. Unlike much other late-nineteenth-century fiction, the novel employs a pattern where racial and sexual discourses are repeatedly set on course only to be derailed, and derailed only to be brought back on track again.

Painted Traces: Art and Ekphrasis in Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-279
Author(s):  
Kate Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past

Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as a trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present? Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within a complex set of relationships, including the narrative in which the paintings are embedded and which can only tell, and not show, the painting's power; the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds it, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and the past, whose relationship to the present the artwork both manifests and constructs. This article explores the use of art in this novel to reflect on the availability of the past in the present, as well as on neo-Victorianism itself, with its power to critique and rework the past and also to fascinate in the present. Ultimately, the novel captures not the power of art to access past lives, but a disconcerting vision of ourselves, caught in the act of (obsessive) re-representation.

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