Too Close for Comfort: Henry James, Richard Wagner and The Sacred Fount

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
As If ◽  
Mutual Friend

In April 1880, one of the most intriguing lost opportunities in musical-literary history took place. Henry James and Richard Wagner were staying in Posilippo, near Naples. James was beginning a two-month visit to Italy, whilst Wagner was living in the Italian town with his family, working on essays including ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1880) and preparing the staging for Parsifal (1882). A mutual friend, Paul von Joukowsky, suggested to James that he and Wagner meet but the offer provoked an emphatic rejection from the American novelist. It would have taken place amid the heady bohemianism, homosexuality and obsessive aestheticism of Wagner's Italian circle of which Joukowsky was a part. No doubt their meeting would have been stilted and strained, suffused with various forms of social awkwardness, yet, as we shall see, James's explanation of his refusal has the overtones of a justification. Despite – or because of – the aborted meeting, James repeatedly returned to this unrealized encounter in his writing. He referred to the composer or his works in more than a dozen of his novels and short stories from the 1880s to the early twentieth century; these muted but resonant references suggest an informed and engaged response to Wagner and his works. It is as if, though these allusions, James re-imagined this event, composer and novelist encountering each other in numerous texts over a period of 20 years

scholarly journals In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literature Analysis ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

Ugliness, Underground, Queer Difference

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Yetta Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Theoretical Overview

The introductory chapter of Ugly Differences provides a theoretical overview of the book and its central interventions on the concepts of ugliness and the underground. It turns to early-twentieth-century examples by Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay to frame genealogical connections between ugliness and queer female difference. This literary history highlights the roles that avant-garde, experimental, primitivist, and vernacular approaches to cultural production play in reflecting nondominant subjects whose differences are routed through de-privileged sites of the aesthetic.

Paranoid Masculinity in a Woman’s Mansion: Henry James’ “The Aspern Papers”

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gero Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Gendered Power

AbstractOver the last decades, literary scholarship has increasingly recognised the importance of Henry James’ fiction for an understanding of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century dynamics of genders and sexualities. In his writing, James repeatedly demonstrates how modern patriarchal masculinities fail to establish themselves as stable identities. On a textual level, he employs a ‘queer rhetoric’ that allows for readings beyond the normative axes masculine-feminine/homosexual-heterosexual. In this paper, I discuss how James, in his tale “The Aspern Papers” (1888), turns traditionally gendered power relations upside-down: while the patriarchal home is the domestic centre of the narrative, it is two women who are in control of its secrets. The male protagonist, a nameless editor, has to rely on the women’s willingness to let him in on their secret, allow him access to the letters of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern, which he assumes to be in their possession, and, hence, let him face his own unspeakable secret in a ‘closet’ that is not his own.

The Indulekha Moment and the Malayalam Literary Canon: On the Literary History of the Early Twentieth-century Novels in Kerala, South India

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sruthi Vinayan ◽  
◽  
Merin Simi Raj ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article analyses the politics of the literary canon of the early twentieth century Malayalam novels with particular focus on the impact of the novel Indulekha (1889) in literary history. The inception of novel as a literary genre is widely regarded as a point of departure for Malayalam literature leading to the development of modern Malayalam, thereby shaping a distinct Malayali identity. Interestingly, the literary histories which established the legacy of Malayalam prose tend to trace a linear history of Malayalam novels which favoured the ‘Kerala Renaissance’ narrative, especially while discussing its initial phase. This calls for a perusal of the literary critical tradition in which the overarching presence of Indulekha has led to the eclipsing of several other works written during the turn of the twentieth-century, resulting in a skewed understanding of the evolution of the genre. This article would explicate in detail, on what gets compromised in canon formation when aesthetic criteria overshadow the extraliterary features. It also examines how the literary history of early Malayalam novels shaped the cultural memory of colonial modernity in Kerala.

Mahler's Seventh Symphony

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Stoll Knecht
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. This book offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler’s compositional materials, combined with a close reading of the finished work. The Seventh has often been heard as “existing in the shadow” of the Sixth Symphony or as “too reminiscent” of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Focusing on sketches previously considered as “discarded,” this study reveals unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger. These connections confirm that Mahler’s compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past, and that this referential aspect should be taken as an important interpretive key to the work. Providing the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, this book sheds new light on its complex compositional history. Each movement of the symphony is considered from a double perspective, genetic and analytic, showing how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. The compositional materials raise the question of Mahler’s reception of Richard Wagner, and thus lead us to rethink issues concerning his own cultural identity. A close reading of the score enlightens these issues by exposing new facets of Mahler’s musical humor. The Seventh moves away from the tragedy of the Sixth toward comedy and shows, in a unique way within Mahler’s output, that humor can be taken as a form of transcendence.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Laats
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
As If

From a twenty-first century perspective, it can seem as if everything has changed. Evangelical and fundamentalist schools have made drastic changes in their teaching and lifestyle rules. Even the most traditionalist schools have adopted some of the structures of mainstream higher education. However, some of the tensions established in the early twentieth century remain strong. Faculty purges, student protests, and inter-school rivalries are just as powerful today as they have been since the 1920s. New anxieties about faculty fidelity to creationist truths repeat patterns laid down decades earlier. And old rivalries between fundamentalist and evangelical institutions show up in new and unexpected ways.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Glyn Morgan ◽  
C. Palmer-Patel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
History Texts ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.

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