Böhmische Skizzen: Reflections on Social Space and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Prague

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alena Šimůnková

Shortly before the Christmas of 1860, the major bookstores in Prague put on display a German-language booklet entitledBohemian Sketches: By a Native Writer.Although the book was published anonymously, its author soon became well known: he was Jan Palacký, the son of the prominent historian and leading Czech politician Frantis̆ek Palacký. But even his famous name did not spare the young man from stormy, harsh criticism that followed after the publication of the book. For weeks the newspapers both in Prague and in Vienna scrutinized the rhetorical nuances of the book, pointing out the author's national and political biases. Surprisingly, neither of the Czech-language newspapers,Národní listynorC̆as, that had recently entered into the public arena, stepped forward in defense of the author. The critical response in the press raises one's curiosity: what was wrong with Jan Palacký's arguments? How could someone so closely connected with Czech national leaders write such a controversial account? Moreover, considering the censorship practices and vigilant police supervision of the time, it is also worth asking how the publication could have escaped the attention of governmental surveillance.

2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Taylor

Many commentators believe that the business press “missed”thestory of the twenty-first century—the 2008 economic crisis. Condemned for being too close to the firms they were supposed to be holding to account, journalists failed in their duties to the public. Recent historical studies of business journalism present a similarly pessimistic picture. By contrast, this article stresses the importance of the press as a key intermediary of reputation in the nineteenth-century marketplace. In England, reporters played an instrumental role in opening up companies' general meetings to the public gaze and in warning investors of fraudulent businesses. This regulation by reputation was at least as important as company law in making the City of London a relatively safe place to do business by the start of the twentieth century.


Journalism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 801-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristy Hess

This essay rethinks the relationship between news media and the universal notion of the ‘common good’ as a key foundational concept for journalism studies. It challenges dominant liberal democratic theories of the press linked to the idea of the ‘public good’ to offer a new way of conceptualizing news media’s relationship to civic life that incorporates power and legitimacy in the changing media world. In doing so, it argues current understandings of journalism’s relationship to the common good also require some re-alignment. The essay draws on Pierre Bourdieu to contend the common good can be understood as a global doxa – an unquestionable orthodoxy that operates as if it were objective truth – across wider social space. How this is carried out in practice depends on the specific context in which it is understood. It positions the common good in relation to news media’s symbolic power to construct reality and argues certain elites generate and reinforce their legitimacy by being perceived as central to negotiating understandings of the common good with links to culture, community and shared values.


1985 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 351-363
Author(s):  
Bernard Aspinwall

‘“Camelot-Camelot:” said I to myself “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”’ so said Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. But the irony is that the joke is now on Twain. In examining The Discovery of the Asylum, David J. Rothman has persuasively argued that the American asylum which developed in the 1820s and 1830s served a dual purpose. It would create the correct desirable attitudes within its inmates and by virtue of its success, set an example of right action to the larger society. The well-ordered asylum would exemplify the proper principles of social organisation and thus insure the safety of the republic and promote its glory. My purpose is to suggest that the monastery in Europe served a similar purpose. Europeans faced similar social and political problems to Americans and the rediscovery of monasticism paralleled the growth of American institutions and served a similar purpose in the public arena. In the process a more tolerant and sympathetic attitude towards religious orders emerged.


2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celso Thomas Castilho

In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nísia Floresta's “Páginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin(1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Páginas” in the public eye for months. TheJornal do Commercio, arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements. Floresta (pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) centered her storyline on the Congo-born Domingos, the “Brazilian Tom,” who exemplified the attributes of Christian virtuosity and resignation found in Stowe's internationally famous novel. Set in the nineteenth century, “Páginas” begins with the ten-year-old Domingos's enslavement on the African coast, and highlights the human devastation of the internal slave trade through his movements across Minas Gerais and on to Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with Domingos's death, at age 54, grief-stricken over his son's recent passing. In part, Floresta's “Páginas” emerged from the Brazilian schoolteacher's longstanding critiques of patriarchy, nation, and education. Twenty years earlier, Floresta had drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft'sA Vindication of the Rights of Womanto writeDireito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens(1832), a book that went through three editions in its first decade. More directly though, Floresta had connected to the so-called “Tom mania” while living in Paris in 1852. The following year, back in Rio, she wrote a pamphlet on women's education—Opúsculo humanitário(1853)—that parsed key aspects ofUncle Tom's Cabin, among a larger discussion of women's achievements internationally. Two Rio newspapers excerpted the pamphlet, and, boldly, published the chapters focused on Uncle Tom. This attention in the press raised the profile of a book the public already knew to be controversial, as newspapers had earlier carried reports of port authorities seizing shipments ofUncle Tom's Cabinin Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. In writing “Páginas,” then, two years after theOpúsculo, Floresta not only carried forward her literary dialogue with Stowe, but also posed the work as a challenge to the status quo. “Páginas” was necessary, she explained, because “slavery is not an issue of concern in the press.” If overstated, given that the topic of slavery was quite prevalent in public discourse, Floresta's assertion nonetheless signals an opportunity for scholars to probe further into the relationship between slavery and the public sphere in the mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it suggests connections to be explored between the press and the early reception ofUncle Tom's Cabinin Brazil, and, more broadly, connections between the representations of slavery in the press, and the institution's enduring legitimacy.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jamie Garrick

<p>Studies of virtuosity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have tended to focus on the piano and the violin. These instruments were obviously virtuosic and lent themselves to visual and aural displays of power, most notably in the case of Liszt and Paganini. These virtuosi crafted spectacles that were often described with metaphors of power and violence. These spectacles came to characterise the virtuosity of the early nineteenth century. However, the guitar has been largely neglected in scholarship dealing with virtuosity from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is due, in large part, to the status of the guitar within that period. Though popular as an accompanying instrument and in the home, the guitar struggled to find a secure position as a legitimate solo instrument in the public arena. While guitarists such as Dionisio Aguado and Mauro Giuliani were described as ‘virtuosi’, their instrument, unlike the piano and the violin, did not give itself to a spectacle that conveyed notions of power and violence. Rather, the guitar is an intimate instrument, quieter than the piano or the violin, and utilising small movements in the hands. These aspects of the instrument, so often perceived as ‘limitations’ led many writers to dismiss it as an inappropriate instrument for performance in the public spheres occupied by the piano and the violin. Guitarist-composers sought to play to the guitar’s strengths in ways that contrasted with the conventional metaphors of power and violence. Some of these attempts rhetorically aligned the guitar with genres and instruments that carried greater cultural capital. Composers used orchestral metaphors and emphasised the guitar’s ability to imitate other instruments. Other guitarist-composers sought to create a greater spectacle both in and beyond the music itself by emphasising physical movements within the music and writing extra-musical gestures into the music. The rhetoric of transformation was used either by or about the guitarist-composers Fernando Sor, Dionisio Aguado, Johann Kaspar Mertz, and Giulio Regondi, all of whom this exegesis focuses on, demonstrating a desire to legitimise the guitar at a time when it struggled not only to find traction as a ‘serious’ classical instrument, but also a place amongst more obviously virtuosic instruments.</p>


Res Publica ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-484
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Gerard

The Belgian scientific literature dealing with political parties has four main characteristics. First it pays great attention to party doctrines and to parliamentary struggle. Indeed, in the nineteenth century political parties do not strike by their organization, which is still undeveloped, nor by their functions, which are still limited, but by the public debate they are stimulating in Parliament and in the press. Only from the end of the century, when the suffrage is extended, the organization of the parties wilt get more articulated and their functions more complicated. Secondly the literature pays great attention to the legitimation of the political parties, which are still controversial particularly because they should threaten the national union. The authors exert oneselves to prove that parliamentary government is by definition a party government. They distinguish parties from factions in order to make the first acceptable. Thirdly the literature deals with the party system.The Belgian authors take the two party system which exists in Great Britain as example and try to prove that the alternation of two parties, the party of conservation and the party of progress, is necessary for the good working of the institutions. Fourthly, the literature, particularly the historica!, is rather descriptive and is characterized by a lack of comparisons, generalizations and hypothesis.Two periods can be distinguished in the literature. In the first period, 1830-1894, the suffrage is limited and the political scene is dominated by two parties (the liberal and the conservative or catholic parties) .This period is marked by the publications of Emile de Laveleye (1822-1892), one of the most prolific writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. In the second period, 1894-1914, the advent of the socialist party disturbs the working of the classical party government.  Maurice Vauthier (1860-1931) is the main author of this period. He tries to establish the characteristics of the party government and its chances in the future.


Author(s):  
Samuel Llano

This chapter shows that the rise of opposition to flamenco and flamenquismo in the late nineteenth century led to verbal abuse of Gypsies in the press and in intellectual production. Journalism and the social sciences used the Gypsy as a scapegoat, blaming him for the ills of the nation and for the public scandals related to Madrid’s booming nightlife. Prominent criminologist Rafael Salillas articulated a bigoted and scathing portrayal of the Gypsy in his book Hampa (1898), in which he also construed flamenco as a criminal type of music. Early flamenco scholars such as Demófilo, Hugo Schuchardt, and Francisco Rodríguez Marín debated the role that Gypsies had played in the making of the flamenco tradition. They argued either that flamenco was a Gypsy creation later improved by Andalusians or that Gypsies had corrupted Andalusian song, turning it into flamenco.


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