Hazlitt's contrariness and familiar prose style: lessons on how to be critical

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Halpin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Conversational Style ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
Self Consistency

Contrariness of the kind manifest in the literary output and general disposition of the nineteenth century English essayist and journalist, William Hazlitt, has much to teach contemporary intellectuals working in the academy about how better to be critical, offering important lessons on the necessity for self-consistency and independence of thought and the need more to write for publication in a familiar and accessible conversational style.

Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-371
Author(s):  
Irena Yamboliev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Sentence Level

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

scholarly journals The science of sensual pleasure according to a Buddhist monk: Ju Mipam's contribution to kāmaśāstra literature in Tibet

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-337
Author(s):  
Sarah H. Jacoby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Indian Science ◽  
Buddhist Monk ◽  
Sensual Pleasure ◽  
Literary Output

AbstractOf all the myriad aspects of Indian learning to be incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist scholarship, one of the least likely would seem to be the Indian science of sensual pleasure, kāmaśāstra. Even so, we do find traces of Sanskrit kāmaśāstra transposed into Tibetan Buddhist idiom. The most innovative example is the Treatise on Passion (’Dod pa'i bstan bcos) written by Ju Mipam Jamyang Namgyel Gyatso (1846–1912). This article investigates the reasons why the polymath monastic scholar Ju Mipam included kāmaśāstra in his expansive literary output, as well as his sources and influences for doing so. It argues that Mipam's work builds on an intertextuality already apparent in late medieval Sanskrit tantric and kāmaśāstric works, but one that took on new importance in the context of the non-biased outlook (Tib. ris med) that characterized Ju Mipam's nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan milieu.

The development of a modern prose style in Arabic literature

1989 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Cachia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Consummate Skill

The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education, and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters—poets and prose writers alike—it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of Rhetoric known as badī, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices2 (such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.

The Anglo-Gallicanism of dom Thomas Preston, 1567–1647

1972 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 239-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurus Lunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thin Red Line ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
The Church

Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.

Coming Home: The Personal Basis of Simon Dubnow's Ideology

AJS Review ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 283-301
Author(s):  
Robert M. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Literary Output

In the mid-1930s, when the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow began to publish his autobiography, he gave it the formidable title The Book of Life: Reminiscences and Reflections, Material for the History of My Time. Drawing not only on his memory, but on copious diaries and a prodigious literary output going back to the 1880s, Dubnow traced his journey from shtetl Judaism to Jewish nationalism—a journey typical (onemight almost say prototypical) of the late-nineteenth-century Russian Jewish intellectual's search for a new definition of himself as Jew and modern man. The substance of Dubnow's Book of Life frees the title from pretentiousness; more than a mere compilation, much of the autobiography (especially the first volume and a half) was an act of synthesis and integratsiia dushi (“self-integration”), two of Dubnow's favorite terms. My aim in this paper is to reflect anew on the process of Dubnow's self-integration, bridging the gap between a purely biographical approach and a purely ideological one in order to show how a distinctive nationalist stance crystallized out of Dubnow's personal growth. Nationalism was a hard-won, by no means self-evident solution to an overlapping sequence of emotional and intellectual dilemmas. Dubnow provides us with a picture of the groping that this self-transformation entailed, a picture that can be supplemented, and to a certain extent revised, by listening for resonances between life and thought undetected by Dubnow himself.

Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry T. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Literary Fame ◽  
The French Revolution

When William Hazlitt died, in 1830, his literary fame was obscured by his political views. The man who admired Napoleon and wrote a biography of him and who championed the radical creed of the French Revolution could hardly have been expected to be popular among Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. During the past twenty-five years, however, several volumes containing selections from his essays have been issued; and most editions of Shakespeare enrich themselves by quoting his opinions. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, printed in 1817, is still very much alive. Heine, in his volume Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen (1838), declared: “With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no Shakespearean commentator of any consequence.” And this verdict, though decidedly exaggerated, gains new interest when we append the Teutonic explosion: “It takes the very heart out of me when I remember that Shakespeare is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in his wrath ever created.”

On Style in Victorian Fiction

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Many

Some writers of the Victorian period, as well as more recent critics, have argued that the prose style of Victorian fiction aims to efface itself or that an absence of style may in itself represent the nineteenth-century ideal. This collection provides a major assessment of style in Victorian fiction and demonstrates that style - the language, techniques and artistry of prose - is inseparable from meaning and that it is through the many resources of style that the full compass of meaning makes itself known. Leading scholars in the field present an engaging assessment of major Victorian novelists, illustrating how productive and illuminating close attention to literary style can be. Collectively, they build a fresh and nuanced understanding of how style functioned in the literature of the nineteenth century, and propose that the fiction of this era demands we think about what style does, as much as what style is.

The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-204
Author(s):  
Daniel Hack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This chapter turns to W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and its deployment of nineteenth-century British literature. Du Bois himself tends to attract the adjective “Victorian” as a descriptor—of his intellectual formation, his prose style, his aesthetic, his morality—with greater frequency than virtually any other figure in the African American literary and intellectual tradition. The chapter shows that critics have been too quick to generalize about the presence of nineteenth-century British literature in Souls. They have rarely asked why Du Bois selected the specific authors, texts, and passages he cites or how these citations contribute to and intervene in a tradition of African American citation and intertextuality. Addressing these questions not only nuances our understanding of Du Bois's rhetorical strategy but also leads us to reconsider a seemingly settled question in the scholarship on Souls: the role Du Bois assigns culture in the fight for racial equality.

IX. Hazlitt as a Critic of Art

PMLA ◽  
1924 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley P. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Large Sections ◽  
Precise Study ◽  
Comprehensive Study

William Hazlitt is read to-day as an essayist and a critic of literature. His art-criticism, except for a few papers preserved in his best known books, is familiar to few readers, and to them it will probably remain a matter of curious interest rather than of serious concern. Before Hazlitt's day even, the foundations had been laid, in the works of Wincklemann and Lessing, of a more precise study of aesthetic principles, which was destined to make obsolete most of the eighteenth-century treatises on art; with their works Hazlitt was, like most other English writers of his day, unacquainted. He was thus so far removed from the best thought of his time that his opinions on art have, for the student of aesthetic theory, little historical importance. The archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century, the rise of impressionism in painting, the spread in all quarters of art and criticism of what may be somewhat roughly termed the naturalistic movement, and especially the development of a more strict and comprehensive study of aesthetic principles, have combined to make large sections of Hazlitt's theoretic discussions unacceptable to-day.

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