Safeguarding the Past: “Presentist” Historicism

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-311
Author(s):  
Francesca Sawaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

AbstractThe V21 Manifesto of 2015 proposes that we revitalize Victorian Studies through the use of presentist historicism, a methodology that recognizes how “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth century.” Presentism—once seen by some as a bug in historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature. While scholars such as Dominick LaCapra and Jennifer Fleissner have also explored presentism in historicist work, the V21 Manifesto brings renewed attention to the questions and problems presentism poses. This review explores two books by members of the V21 Collective. Both interrogate vital issues in the present: Anna Kornbluh focuses on financialization and canonical Victorian and modernist texts, Susan Zieger on ephemera and affect and middlebrow texts. Both differently erudite books reinvigorate our thinking about the past. At the same time, both books avoid questions of production in the past and present. Such avoidance creates nondialectical and specialist accounts of the past’s relation to the present and enshrines and safeguards Victorian literary studies’ privileged objects of study and methodologies. Appreciative of the ways the V21 Manifesto has renewed attention to presentist historicism, the review nonetheless argues for more reflexive and contestatory accounts of the past’s relation to the present.

Background and Foreground: Getting Things in Context

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Knight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information Retrieval ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
The World ◽  
Exact Reproduction ◽  
The 1960S

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader.

Laissez-faire Theory in Presidential Messages during the Nineteenth Century

1941 ◽  
Vol 1 (S1) ◽  
pp. 86-95
Author(s):  
R. M. Havens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Industrial Nation ◽  
American People ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
The World ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
American Way

During the past decade the rapid spread of governmental activities into new fields and their extension within the fields that had previously been entered have increased the attention always given to the question of the legitimate sphere of activity for the Federal Government. There has been a widespread assumption that throughout the nineteenth century with only insignificant exceptions this country followed a policy of laissez-faire. From this assumption many people have proceeded to argue that in the past decade the American people have suddenly turned from the tradition which made this the greatest industrial nation of the world and have adopted a course which leads away from the “American way of life.”

The World-Revealing Goblet: Reading Farhād Mīrzā’s Geographical Treatise Jām-i Jam as a Lithograph

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 409-449
Author(s):  
Zeinab Azarbadegan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
University Library ◽  
Political Networks ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Geographic Knowledge ◽  
The World

Abstract This article examines a copy of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam (the World-Revealing Goblet) published in 1856 in Tehran and kept at Columbia University Library offsite storage. It demonstrates the dual importance of this book in geographic knowledge production and as part of the library of Saʿīd Nafīsī, one of the most prominent Iranian scholars of Persian literature. Methodologically, the paper offers various ways to study a single lithograph to decipher larger historical processes in histories of education, translation, and print. First, it analyzes the paratext to expose scholarly and political networks in order to examine the genealogy of geographic knowledge production in mid-nineteenth century Qajar Iran. Second, it studies the content and translation practices employed by Farhād Mīrzā to offer novel strategies for analyzing dissemination and reception of new ways of production and categorization of geographic knowledge as well as methods utilized in composition of pedagogical geography books. Finally, it discusses how cataloging practices affect current scholarship and lead to rendering certain texts “hidden.” It therefore illustrates how the study of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam, a book aspiring to reveal the world, can expose much about scholarly practices not only in the past but also the present.

William Webb Ellis and the Origins of Rugby Football: The Life and Death of a Victorian Myth

1981 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Four Corners ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Foreign Competitors

In the sense that myth is a reordering of various random elements into an intelligible, useful pattern, a structuring of the past in terms of present priorities, nineteenth-century Englishmen were inveterate myth-makers. As liberal and scientific thought shook the foundations of belief, the Victorians erected gothic spires as monuments to a medieval order of supposedly simple, strong faith. While their industrial masses languished, they extolled the virtues of self-made men. Confronted with foreign competitors and rebellious colonials, they instinctively asserted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In classic myth-making style, the Victorians set about “reorganizing traditional components in the face of new circumstances or, correlatively, in reorganizing new, imported components in the light of tradition.”Myth not only serves self-validating ends; it also provides a cohesive rationale, a fulcrum propelling people towards great achievements. If the Victorians were confident and self-congratulatory, they had cause to be: their material, intellectual, and political accomplishments were many. Not the least of their successes was in the sphere of sports and games, a subject often ignored by historians. Especially in the development of ball games—Association and Rugby football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf—the Victorians modernized old games, created new ones, and exported them all to the four corners of the earth. Stereotyped as overly-serious folk, they in fact “taught the world to play.”Since sport, more than most forms of human activity, lends itself to myth-making, it is not surprising to find a myth emerging among the late-Victorians having to do with the origins of Rugby football. Like baseball's Doubleday myth, the tale of William Webb Ellis inspiring the distinctive game of rugby is a period piece, reflecting more of the era which gave it birth than of the event to which it referred.

The Whig Interpretation of the Welfare State

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Ashford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social History ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Welfare State

Butterfield's well-known warning to historians may hold important lessons for the analysis of the contemporary welfare state. In his view, the Whig historians distorted history by interpreting the past in terms of the present. They allowed themselves to become “dispensers of moral judgments” by dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress. Many contemporary explanations of welfare states pose the same problem, not so much because social science intentionally excludes the past, but because the search for rigorous empirical explanations of our present choices and accomplishments is divorced from the past. As Himmelfarb noted in her comments on the study of social history, the investigations of this intricate transformation of nineteenth-century liberal states are now virtually “two cultures.”

Victorian Plants: Cosmopolitan and Invasive

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-53
Author(s):  
Lynn Voskuil
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Invasive Plants ◽  
Invasion Biology ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
Nonnative Species ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Methodological Reflection

The terms “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” name ideas that have long figured prominently in the practices, the methods, and the unexamined assumptions of Victorian studies. These categories also shape the study of plants, both now and in the nineteenth century, along with related terms like “native,” “exotic,” and “hybrid.” “Invasion biology,” for example, currently describes the study of how nonnative species spread around the world, and the phrase “nativism-cosmopolitanism dichotomy” has been used to describe the impasse between different approaches to global plant distribution and migration. This paper will put these variable disciplinary conceptions of “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” into conversation with each other, offering a methodological reflection with the goal of clarifying their meanings and applications in and for current scholarship of the Victorian period. If ecological uses of these ideas, like aesthetic and political uses, are rooted in the nineteenth century, their disparate strands have not yet been sufficiently disentangled. What difference does it make to speak of invasive plants as compared to human invaders? How does our sense of cosmopolitanism, empire, and invasion change when pressure is exerted from other fields? Perhaps most importantly, what are the ethical dimensions of these concepts, especially when nonhuman entities are included?

scholarly journals Toleration as a Subject for World Education? Past and Present Perspectives for Students the World Over Based on Literary-Historical Material

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Keyword(s):  
Global Education ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
The Individual

This study reexamines the meaning of education in global terms as the foundation of all open and democratic societies both in the past and the present. Literary studies create useful mirrors taking the learner into the past where parallel cases of human problems and conflicts existed. The learning experience then allows the individual to carry the new insights back to the own presence and to apply them to current situations. This process can and must be applied particularly to the principle of tolerance, one of the highest ideals in all of education. In order to illustrate this concept, this study examines Boccaccio’s Decameron and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as model cases for global education leading to a more peaceful and mutually respectful world.

Immutability

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leftow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Change ◽  
First Cause

The doctrine of divine immutability consists in the assertion that God cannot undergo real change. Plato and Boethius infer divine immutability from God’s perfection, Aristotle from God’s being the first cause of change, Augustine from God’s having created time. Aquinas derives divine immutability from God’s simplicity, his having no parts or attributes which are distinct from himself. All of these arguments finally appeal to aspects of God’s perfection; thus, the doctrine of divine immutability grew from a convergence of intuitions about perfection. These intuitions dominated Western thought about God well into the nineteenth century. The doctrine’s foes argue that God’s power, providence and knowledge require its rejection. Their arguments contend that since the world does in fact change through time, this must entail change in God. If God responds to changing historical circumstances and to prayers, that would seem to require some sort of change in him (from not responding to responding). And if he does not intervene to prevent a war, for example, then after the war, he will have lost the power to prevent it (assuming, as many do, that God cannot alter the past), so again there is a change of state. Finally, it is argued that God’s knowledge of tensed truths (for example, ‘it is now noon’) must change as what time ‘now’ is changes. Some responses to these arguments appeal to the claim that God is in some sense outside time.

Alexander Grosart, ‘The First True Gentleman That Ever Breathed’, and the Independent Scholar

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (262) ◽  
pp. 264-282
Author(s):  
Charles Cathcart
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Independent Basis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Editorial Work

Abstract The Presbyterian clergyman and amateur scholar Alexander Grosart borrowed a line from the Renaissance play, The Honest Whore, Part One, in his sermon for the opening of Blackburn’s new church in 1868. Christ ‒ says Grosart ‒ was ‘the first true gentleman that ever breathed’. Exploring the resonances of this unacknowledged use of secular drama and turning to the editorial work of Grosart himself allows the essay’s underlying concern to emerge. What does it mean to be an independent scholar? This is an issue with implications for all who value scholarly study within the humanities ‒ for the practice of academic research in literary studies is diminished if these studies are the preserve of salaried academics and if the discussions that they comprise rarely extend beyond universities. This subject, so it is argued – the place of scholarship undertaken on an unaffiliated or independent basis in the world of English studies – is a topic worthy of sustained attention. In this essay, I acknowledge the challenges of scope and tact that lie in the path of all who pursue this matter and I propose that one way of doing so is to celebrate the work of the amateur scholars of the past. The essay concludes by returning to Alexander Grosart and reflecting upon his reputation during the years since his death in 1899.

Nationality and liberty, protestant and catholic: Robert Southey’s Book of the Church

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 409-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Human Race ◽  
English History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

The Victorian liberal Roman catholic historian lord Acton thought that the history of the world was one of the growth of liberty. By liberty, he meant national independence and freedom of speech and worship, the liberties of nineteenth-century liberalism: and in his conception of the past, he drew on the whig interpretation of English history as a conflict between a progressive tradition and a reactionary one: between churches, parties and classes representing either freedom or authority. The classic statement of the idea is the whig lord Macaulay’s in 1835:Each of those great and ever-memorable struggles, Saxon against Norman, Villein against Lord, Protestant against Papist, Roundhead against Cavalier, Dissenter against Churchman, Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order and season, a struggle, on the result of which were staked the dearest interests of the human race; and every man who, in the contest which, in his time, divided our country distinguished himself on the right side, is entitled to our gratitude and respect.

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