To Make a New Thermopylae: Hellenism, Greek Liberation, and the Battle of Thermopylae

2000 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Macgregor Morris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Greek History ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

In the eighteenth century, attitudes towards ancient Greece were changing from an antiquarian interest in literature and art, into a wider emotional affiliation that permeated many aspects of artistic and political life. With this new attitude came an interest in contemporary Greece and an awareness of and concern about her state under Turkish rule which, by the early nineteenth century, culminated in growing sympathy for the cause of Greek liberation. Of all the characters and incidents of ancient Greek history, none played such a central part in this tradition as those involved in the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 B.C., so that by the very eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 Byron could call on his contemporaries to ‘make a new Thermopylae’. The history of Thermopylae in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is, in many ways, the history of contemporary hellenism.

Geopolitics of Comparison: World Literature Avant la Lettre

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.

Orientalism, Medievalism, Colonialism, and Militarized Mercantilism

2020 ◽  
pp. 415-429
Author(s):  
Kathleen Davis ◽  
Nadia R. Altschul
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

This chapter investigates the intersections of British medievalism and colonialism in two very different places in the world: early nineteenth-century Chile, as Britain exercised economic domination over parts of the former Spanish Empire (thus it will be termed neocolonial); and late eighteenth-century India, as British officials devised strategies for extracting revenue from Bengal. Despite their many differences, in both cases an area beyond Europe is defined as Moorish and its present is associated with Europe’s past, specifically with the centuries now termed ‘medieval’. In both cases, too, medievalization forwards the economic interests at the basis of this temporal discourse, which is also fully enmeshed in the history of Orientalism. These similarities demonstrate the value of studying the under-examined effects of British medievalism beyond the familiar national frameworks, and, more broadly, underscore the importance of investigating the global dimensions of temporalizing phenomena.

Animating Athens

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
Matthew Duquès
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Greek History

In the early nineteenth century, a revival of all things ancient Greek opened opportunities for women on either side of the Atlantic to study Greek history, literature, and myth as the products of a powerful world apart from their own, and to re-envision that world through fictional dialogues, sketches, and romances. While the resulting body of literature has been studied for its contributions to modern discourses on aesthetics, sexuality, and politics, little work has been done to understand how this popular, Romantic Hellenism served to expand upon an enlightenment-oriented environmental perspective that sought to counter the first effects of industrialization. This essay takes such a tack. It situates Wright's and Child's comments on the gender of suns, rivers, landscapes, and polities in "A Few Days in Athens" and “Philothea: A Grecian Romance,” two short, philosophical fictions that emphasize the pristine and luminous, yet fundamentally endangered natural worlds of ancient Greece. I argue that their visions of the Greek environments of the deep past as subject to cycles of declension and regeneration offer model for future theories of ecology.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

scholarly journals Smoking Clubs in Graphic Satire and the Anglicizing of Tobacco in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
Graphic Satire ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Cultural Connotations

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).

scholarly journals In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Role

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

Whence Orycteropus? The correct authorship and date for the generic name of the aardvark (Mammalia, Tubulidentata, Orycteropodidae)

Bionomina ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL WOODMAN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Description ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comprehensive History

All else being equal, the principle of priority in zoological taxonomic nomenclature gives precedence to the earliest name for a particular taxon. Determining the origin of some late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century taxonomic names, however, can be vexing, particularly when the history of a name was never completely documented in contemporary synonymies. The authorship and date for Orycteropus Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1796: 102, the genus-group name for the African aardvark, Orycteropus afer (Pallas, 1766), has been variously ascribed to at least four authors other than É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Using digitally imaged publications now available in a variety of internet-accessible libraries, I traced the comprehensive history of the name and show how and, to some extent, why its origin became obscured. É. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s original description was re-published twice, most likely to make the description more widely available. Rather than reinforce his authorship for the name, however, the surprising consequence of the multiple publications was to cast doubt on it.

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

The Politics of Poetics in Early Qajar Iran: Writing Royal-Commissioned Tazkeras at Fath-ʿAli Shāh’s Court

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naofumi Abe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Persian Poetry ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Abstract The middle of the eighteenth century reportedly witnessed the emergence of the new literary movement in Persian poetry, called the “bāzgasht-e adabi,” or literary return, which rejected the seventeenth-century mainstream Indian or tāza-guʾi style. This literary movement recently merits increased attention from many scholars who are interested in wider Persianate cultures. This article explores the reception of this movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Iran and the role played by the Qajar royal court in it, mainly by the analysis of a specific sub-genre of tazkeras, called “royal-commissioned tazkeras,” which were produced from the reign of the second Qajar monarch Fath-ʿAli Shāh onward. A main focus will be on the reciprocal relationship between the court poets/literati and the shah, which presumably somehow affected our understanding of Persian literature today.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Quest for Natural Species

1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-553
Author(s):  
Alexandre Métraux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was a prolific writer, a multifaceted naturalist, and a zoologist by second profession. Throughout his adult life he lived up to his passion of politely contributing to the advancement of natural philosophy by publishing more than 30,000 pages, probably too much for even the most scrupulous (and persevering) historians of science who seek to reconstruct his theories and to shed some light on the role he played in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century biology.

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