Imagining Equality in a Gilded Age: Edward Bellamy’s Radical Utopian Critique of Progressivism

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 639-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Cadle
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Economic Inequalities

Abstract Equality (1897), Edward Bellamy’s sequel to his bestseller Looking Backward (1888), has received significantly less critical attention than its predecessor has, with scholars often dismissing it as a minor extension or revision of the author’s utopian vision. Situating Bellamy’s sequel alongside his growing disenchantment with the pace of Progressive reform, this essay argues that Equality radically reframes Bellamy’s utopian project as an extended critique of the economic inequalities of capitalism and the putatively democratic processes that sustain those inequalities. Recovering the full extent of Bellamy’s radicalism during the Gilded Age and the rise of Progressivism offers twenty-first-century readers the opportunity to rethink the range of possible responses to present-day economic inequality.

scholarly journals Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Magic of Sociality, and Radical Fantasy

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
King John

Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, a time in which magic is intertwined with the world much as it would be today if magic arose now. Examining the sociable magician Norrell, the questionably resurgent medieval king John Uskglass and the African-descended manservant Stephen Black provide different models of what the interrelationship between magic and reality can be and serve to destabilize any sense of a sovereign past in the book. The book’s plural magical modernity’s counter any atavistic sovereignty. By taking the reading of Clarke’s novel beyond nostalgic sovereignty, one can understand how it participates in the twenty-first century revaluation of fantasy as politically progressive and epistemically radical.

Fashioning Prince: Bikini briefs, trench coats and zoot suits, 1978–91

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Casci Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
First Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Twenty First Century

Minneapolis-born Prince Rogers Nelson is often revered as one of the most influential figures in twenty-first-century popular culture. A true provocateur, Prince consistently challenged perceptions of gender and sexuality throughout his career, which spanned over four decades. Since his untimely passing on 21 April 2016, not only have fans around the world celebrated the musician’s life, but his oeuvre, representation and style have garnered increasing critical academic attention. This article will contribute to this burgeoning body of academic work on Prince and his lasting legacy, through a focus upon tracing the development of Prince’s iconic sartorial style, from his debut release For You (1978) to the worldwide success of his thirteenth studio album, Diamonds and Pearls (1991). Throughout this period, Prince aroused, entertained and shocked audiences simultaneously. Whilst critical attention has been paid to his music, background and identity, there remains comparatively little academic work focusing specifically and in detail upon his garments and style. This article will chart the emerging custom designed and created style of Prince through sequential album eras, focusing on important garments worn throughout music videos, concerts and album art.

scholarly journals Preparing Young Writers for Invoking and Addressing Today’s Interactive Digital Audiences

2013 ◽  
pp. 54-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa McGrail ◽  
J. Patrick McGrail
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Students ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Fifth Graders ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Classroom Teachers ◽  
Interactive Method ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Twenty First Century

Twenty-first century technologies, in particular the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, have transformed the practice of writing and exposed it to interactivity. One interactive method that has received a lot of critical attention is blogging. The authors sought to understand more fully whom young bloggers both invoked in their blogging (their idealized, intentional audience) and whom they addressed (whom they actually blogged to, following interactive posts). They studied the complete, yearlong blog histories of fifteen fifth-graders, with an eye toward understanding how these students constructed audiences and modified them, according to feedback they received from teachers as well as peers and adults from around the world. The authors found that these students, who had rarely or never blogged before, were much more likely to respond to distant teachers, pre-service teachers, and graduate students than to their own classroom teachers or peers from their immediate classroom. The bloggers invoked/addressed their audiences differently too, depending on the roles that they had created for their audiences and themselves. The authors explore how and why this came to be the case with young writers.

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Perelman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Language Writing ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Twenty First Century

Gertrude Stein was a modernist writer of the twentieth century, notable for the extremity of her stylistic innovations. During the first half of her career, her radical experimentation made her a target of mockery. In 1933, she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a memoir of modernist activity in Paris written in a more accessible style. Intellectually serious but amusing and filled with gossip about charismatic figures (Picasso and Hemingway, among others), it was a surprise best seller in the USA and made Stein a celebrity; she remained an affectionately regarded public figure for the rest of her life. However, at her death and for decades after, she was not a respectable object of critical attention. To university critics, Joyce, Pound, and Eliot had set the standard for literary achievement, and Stein’s work seemed a formless self-indulgence. It was not until the latter decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of a number of related intellectual and artistic forces — feminist critics and poets, the general US innovative poetic tendency, Language writing, and post-structuralism — that Stein began to be taken seriously. In the twenty-first century, while her writing still raises controversy, it is prominent in the modernist canon.

The Fight against Want

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony F. Heath ◽  
Elisabeth Garratt ◽  
Ridhi Kashyap ◽  
Yaojun Li ◽  
Lindsay Richards
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Food Insecurity ◽  
Household Income ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fourfold Increase ◽  
Modest Increase ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Material Progress ◽  
Western Democracies

How successful has Britain been in tackling the giant of Want? Britain experienced greatly increased standards of material prosperity during the second half of the twentieth century, with a fourfold increase in GDP per head, similar to that achieved in other large Western democracies. However, Britain saw an even larger increase in economic inequality than did peer countries such as France and Germany. Increased inequality means that the benefits of rising material prosperity were not shared equally but went disproportionately to the better-off. The modest increase in household income for the poorest families suggests that Want, or poverty, should have declined too. However, poorer households also saw their levels of debt rise sharply after 1999, while the rising use of foodbanks and increasing food insecurity suggests that material progress for the poorest may have stalled in the twenty-first century, or gone into reverse.

Micro-literature and Parodic Games in John Crace’s Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century

Tekstualia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-108
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Szeremeta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literary Classics ◽  
Role Of The Reader ◽  
The Guardian

The following article aims to discuss parodic reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first century readers as a form of micro-literature. The short format initiated in 2000 by the British satirist John Crace in The Guardian has become increasingly popular and outshone longer, traditional narratives. Although it generated significant critical attention it has not been exhausted by other researchers. Thus, the main objective is the analysis of the transformative process of digestion between source-texts and their abridged versions. The most relevant aspects investigated here include generic boundaries of parody and pastiche, intertextual strategies and the role of the reader.

scholarly journals Intimations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Faltering Voices of the Precariat in Annie Baker’s The Flick

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Ana Fernández-Caparrós
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Hardship ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Drama ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
Twenty First Century

While much critical attention as been devoted to the representation of precarity on the European stages, and in British theatre in particular, dramatic texts produced in the United States that concern, depict and represent the lives of members of the so-called precariat have barely been the object of critical scrutiny. This article traces the emergence of a growing concern with economic hardship in the second decade of the twenty-first century in American drama and presents a case study of Annie Baker’s The Flick (2013). Baker’s play is illustrative of an aesthetics of precarity that refrains from victimizing the members of the precariat and that plays out the paradoxes of scenarios of precarity as being at once troubling and enabling transformation and visions of possibility.  

scholarly journals Changes in Economic Inequality in Europe and Latin America in the First Decades of the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 265-292
Author(s):  
Agustín Salvia
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Income Distribution ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Family Income ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis chapter contains a comparative analysis of the changes in the inequality of family income distribution in the last two decades in Latin America and Europe. The study examines the degree to which the economic-productive factors—associated with the primary income distribution—or, on the contrary, the social policies—linked to the secondary distribution—reveal structural differences in economic inequality between regions in the 2000–2017 period. Based on a wide sample of countries, the evolution of inequality is compared within and between regions. The dissimilarity of these behaviours is examined as well as how valid certain economic-institutional factors are to give an account of the changes that occurred within each region.The chapter shows that, in the last two decades of the twenty-first century, Western Europe and Latin America have reduced their economic inequality gap, although following different paths: while inequality decreased in the majority of Latin American countries, an inverse process, although moderate, has been taking place in the majority of Europe. While both trends had national exceptions, the evidence presented helps us to deduce that it was simultaneously due to productive changes and to changes in the growth style, and to transformations in the redistributive efficiency of expenditure on social policies.

Coda Election Fatigue

2018 ◽  
pp. 150-158
Author(s):  
Nathan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Emotions ◽  
Twenty First Century

If preceding chapters employed an atmospheric metaphor for thinking about politics’ affective environments the Coda argues that recent theories of temporality provide another important model for understanding Gilded Age political emotion. The chapter examines Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Washington novel Through One Administration (1881), whose title invokes a unit of official time that also bookends the novel’s love plots. Like Whitman’s neologism “presidentiad,” Burnett’s “administration” privileges the rhythms of electoral politics while also imagining that such timeframes could organize alternative forms of intimacy. This chapter argues that Burnett’s tale of Washingtonians moving alongside but not fully in step with administrative time suggests a rubric for revising recent queer theories of temporality which often valorize asynchronous sociality as necessarily radical. The chapter concludes by noting that in twenty-first-century vernacular “election fatigue” offers a related diagnosis of negative political emotions as indexes of the public’s fraught engagement with politics.

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