scholarly journals Masculinity, Madness and Empire in Kipling’s ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Head Injury ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Institutional records suggest that the grounds for anxiety about insanity in late-nineteenth-century India were many and varied. Amongst other causes, one might have been rendered insane by sunstroke, fever, head injury, strong drink, and inherited tendency, the loss of money, grief, jealousy, anger, sexual excess, excessive joy, or (perhaps disturbingly) excessive study.1 With such a panoply of anxieties to explore, it is scarcely surprising that Rudyard Kipling’s Indian fiction abounds with characters who experience madness of various kinds and degrees. This paper focuses on two short stories collected in Kipling’s 1888 volume Plain Tales from the Hills: ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’. These two stories offer particular insight into madness, its relationship to masculinity, and its consequences for the social order of British India. As Jonathan Saha has pointed out, madness in a colonial context was doubly significant. Since insanity ‘could strike anyone, rulers and the ruled, men and women . . . madness threatened to undermine the colonial racial boundary and disrupt the established norms of masculinity and femininity’.2 Both ‘Thrown Away’ and ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’ explore or expose a psychological crisis that takes the form of a deviation from gender norms and is resolved by an enforced return to those norms. Reading the stories alongside asylum records, this paper contextualizes their representation of gender and madness and argues that the fiction offers a glimpse of what might fill important gaps in the archival record.

The Fin-de-Siècle Detective: ‘But My Job Don’t End There’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Reitz
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Control

This chapter re-examines late nineteenth-century detective fiction. It challenges views of the genre as a conservative phenomenon that reassures its readers by exposing and then vanquishing threats to the social order. Through analysing a range of detective fiction, involving male and female detectives, it highlights the frailties of the specialist knowledge the detective processes, and how it is more often the case that the genre testifies to the inadequacy of professional knowledge to apprehend and control the world, pointing a persisting and threatening sense of violence and social chaos that eludes the detective’s grasp.

The Failed Campaign Against Prostitution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Red Light ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cult Of Domesticity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Reform Organizations

Protestants criticized prostitution because it threatened the family and ultimately civil society, and the Watch and Ward Society devised a campaign to shut down Boston’s red-light districts. These Protestant elites espoused traditional gender roles and Victorian sexual mores and endorsed the “cult of domesticity.” In the late nineteenth century, a number of reform organizations turned their attention to the “social evil,” as it was popularly called. The Watch and Ward Society’s quest to reduce prostitution placed it squarely within the larger international anti-prostitution movement. Moral reformers resisted all forms of policy that officially sanctioned or tacitly tolerated prostitution, instead arguing for its abolition. Their attempt to suppress commercialized sex eventually collapsed because of the lack of public support.

Sufis and the Sufi Lodges in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Socio-Spatial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Profiles

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
Insight Into

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

scholarly journals SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THREE SHORT STORIES WRITTEN BY LEO TOLSTOY

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 241-248
Author(s):  
Faiha Fakhari Mousa Alkayed
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
Deep Insight ◽  
The Social ◽  
Real Picture ◽  
Insight Into

The paper presents a discussion of three selected short stories written by Leo Tolstoy namely: “God Sees the Truth but Wait, Three Questions, and What Men Live By”. Thus, the aim of this paper is to reveal the social consciousness as appeared in such literary kind because awareness plays an important role in people's lives and all our lives are built on the awareness of things. However, it has been noticed that this work of Leo Tolstoy mirrors awareness of traditional and modern values and have thematic varieties, deep insight into human realities and characters. The stories of Leo Tolstoy represent an authentic and real picture of human life which considered being a convincing story.

The Politics of Producerism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine McNicol Stock
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural People ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
North And South

Since colonial times, farmers and other rural men and women have organized to protect their livelihoods and communities from the powerful interests of centralized governments, big banks, and large corporations. In protests movements spanning from Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts to the Farmers Holiday Association in Iowa, rural people agitated for control over local politics and for reforms to the political and economic system that would protect their interests. The Populist Party of the late nineteenth century is among the most important of these groups, as farmers in the north and south came together to create a new kind of political community.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
North Americans ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
The Social ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Missionary Service ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines the foundations that shaped the racial liberalism of American liberal Protestants from the late nineteenth century through World War II. Included is an overview of their missionary service with the Japan YMCA, the modernist theology that inspired their social reform, and the role emerging trends in the social sciences played in shaping their views on race and assimilation in the early 1900s. The chapter also introduces the impact racial liberalism had on Asian North Americans who embraced assimilation and acculturation in the 1920s and 1930s as the best solution to prevent racial discrimination.

Dazzling the Multitude Original Media Spectacles

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Point To Point

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.

Dropkin, Celia (1887–1956)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Legutko
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Usa ◽  
And Gender

Celia Dropkin, one of the greatest yet lesser-known Yiddish poets, revolutionized modern Yiddish poetry with her pioneering exploration of gender dynamics. Bold erotic motifs in Dropkin’s poetry shocked her contemporaries, while her poems, written mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, sound au courant in the twenty-first century. In her poetry, Dropkin addressed themes such as sexuality, love, artistic creativity, motherhood, and nature — as well as domination and sexual politics in man-woman relationships. Born in Bobruisk, Belarus as Tsilye Levin, she wrote her first poems in Russian at the age of 10. After her immigration to the USA in 1912, she began writing in Yiddish, making her literary debut in 1918. She was affiliated with modernist groups formed by Yiddish poets in America, such as Di Inzikhistin [Introspectivists] and Di Yunge [The Young]. During her lifetime, she published only one volume of poetry, In heysn vint. Her children reissued the volume after her death, updating it to include her short stories and reproductions of paintings that she created later in life. Dropkin’s modernist poetry shattered cultural stereotypes about the social and gender roles imposed on men and women, making her a path-breaking poet who ‘filled the stillness of Yiddish poetry with a passionate breath’ (Yakov Glatshtayn).

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