scholarly journals Playing Cute: Sensation Villainy and the Aesthetics of Small Things in The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Literary Character ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Small Things ◽  
Physical Sensation

Abstract In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai defines ‘cute’ as an aesthetic ‘preoccupation with small, easy to handle things . . . an aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and the vulnerable’. Although Ngai identifies the cute as a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon, and one which is inextricably bound up with the mass-market commodification, even eroticization and fetishization of the cute object or person, it is difficult to imagine a literary character more enamoured with ‘small things’ – from tiny, sugary confections to his menagerie of pet mice – than Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, or a character who so perfectly conforms to the definition of the cute commodity itself as ‘appealing specifically . . . for protection and care’ than the ‘childish, helpless, babyfied’ Lucy Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). This article reads Count Fosco and Lady Audley through the characteristics of cuteness to better understand the aesthetic and economic dynamics of their villainy, and to establish for the twentieth-century phenomenon of cuteness identified by Ngai a discernible genealogy in the specific conjunction of print culture, theatricality, commodification, and physical sensation that we now recognize as the sensation fiction of the 1860s.

scholarly journals MYSTERY AS A META-GENRE IN THE DRAMA OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-26
Author(s):  
K. Oliinyk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
General Feeling ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of

The article examines the specificity of existence of the renewed mystery genre as a meta genre in the twentieth century. The main literary study views on the definition of ancient and medieval / Christian ritual mystery are analyzed. The beginning of the twentieth century was full of a general feeling of catastrophe and tragic hopelessness. In artistic terms, the consequence of this was the activation of Christian issues, motives, plots, religious genres (miracles, morality and mystery). The most universal from the point of view of the ideological message and content for the writers of the twentieth century. was the matrix of the medieval mystery, which retained the ritual basis in its primary structure. This made it possible for the multilevel organization of the action and the space for it. The genre of medieval mystery is being modified, it ceases to be a purely form of religious action and acquires the quality of a meta genre. There is a transition from the religious sphere to the secular one, and the aesthetic one is replacing the didactic load. Mystery begins to exist on the edge of genres as a synthetic formation, showing intentions to “help” other genres. A large number of dramatic works of the twentieth century. ("Forest Song" by Lesia Ukrainka, "Iconostasis of Ukraine" by Vіra Vovk) comes close to the mystery, using its archetypal components: the ideas of faith in the absolute beginning, governing the eternal rotation of life and death, world order and harmony, death and rebirth, transformations of the human soul, chosenness and initiation associated with trials, sacrifice, deepening into mysticism. Such works are a certain imitation with elements of mythological or religious subjects. So, the twentieth century, actualizes a certain involvement of the semantic content of dramas to the mysteries, bringing the mystery to the level of the meta genre.

Spying in the British Post Office: Letter-Opening, Italy and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Central Place ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Private Homes ◽  
National Stereotypes

This chapter discusses Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60) in relation to the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal, which revealed British government spying against Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into sensation fiction, helping to create the imaginative space through which the sensation genre could begin to interrogate Gothic national stereotypes and relocate the Gothic plot within modern Britain’s private homes and institutions. The letter-opening scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, generating and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism that emerged from the collision of British and Italian politics and print culture.

“To persuade them into speech and action”: Oratory and the Tamil Political, Madras, 1905–1919

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Bate
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
The Common ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractAll the elements of twentieth-century politics in Tamilnadu cohere in 1918–1919: human and natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, linguistic nationalism, and even the politics of caste reservation. Much has been written of how this politics was mediated by newspapers, handbills, and chapbooks, and the dominant narrative of such events privileges the circulation of print and print culture of vernacular language. This paper explores the relatively lesser-known story of the role and impact of vernacular oratory on the development of the mass political in Tamilnadu from the Swadeshi movement (1905–1908) to the formation of labor unions (1917–1919), and the explicit attempt to persuade non-elites into speech, action, and ultimately politics. I argue that Tamil oratory was an infrastructural element in the production of the political, at least the political as we understand it in twentieth-century Tamilnadu, where oratory became the defining activity of political practice. When elites made the conscious move to begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was formed along with a new definition of what politics would look like. The paper considers what such new agency and definitions entail in pursuit of a better understanding of what constitutes the political generally and the Tamil political in particular.

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert McParland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Cultural Measures ◽  
Cultural Anxieties ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

scholarly journals Stateless Memory

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-434
Author(s):  
Marianne Hirsch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
National Community ◽  
Artistic Works ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract Responding to current conditions of statelessness by way of Hannah Arendt's mid- twentieth century reflections, this article proposes the aesthetic encounter as a practice of alternative, counter-national community and belonging. Artistic works exploring the vulnerabilities and the vicissitudes of statelessness by Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Mutu inspire a definition of stateless memory as a suspension or hiatus in time and space. Stateless memory, the article suggests, can mobilize the memory of painful pasts in a different time frame than the progression toward preordained futures that often seem inevitable in the space-time of the nation-state and the catastrophes it causes and suffers.

Towards a Minor Poetry: Reading Twentieth-Century French Poetry with Deleuze–Guattari and Bakhtin

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Daisy Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Language System ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Poetry Reading ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Minor

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretations of the term, and interrogating the value of the distinction between minor poetry and minor literature. The article considers Bakhtin's work, which offers several parallels to Deleuze and Guattari's in its consideration of the language system and the place of literature within it, but which also addresses questions of genre. It pursues Christian Prigent's hypothesis, in contrast to Bakhtin's account of poetic discourse, that Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization might offer a definition of poetic language. Considering the work of two French-language poets, Ghérasim Luca and Olivier Cadiot, the article argues that the term ‘minor poetry’ gains an additional relevance for experimental twentieth-century poetry which grapples with its own generic identity, deterritorializing established conceptions of poetry, and making ‘minor’ the major poetic discourses on which it is contingent.

A Comparative Exploration of the Spiritual Authority of the Awliyā’ in the Shi‘i and Sufi Traditions

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Rebecca Masterton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Comparison ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Islamic Belief

This paper aims to engage in a critical comparison of the spiritual authority of the awliyā’ in the Shi‘i and Sufi traditions in order to examine an area of Islamic belief that remains unclearly defined. Similarities between Shi‘i and Sufi doctrine have long been noted, but little research has been conducted on how and why they developed. Taking a central tenet of both, walāyah, the paper discusses several of its key aspects as they appear recorded in Shi‘i ḥadīth collections and as they appear later in one of the earliest Sunni Sufi treatises. By extention, it seeks to explore the identity of the awliyā’ and their role in relation to the Twelve Imams. It also traces the reabsorption into Shi‘i culture of the Sufi definition of walāyah via two examples: the works of one branch of the Dhahabi order and those of Allamah Tabataba’i, a popular twentieth-century Iranian mystic and scholar.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

Poe and His Global Advocates

2018 ◽  
pp. 596-617
Author(s):  
Emron Esplin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Rio De La Plata ◽  
Río De La Plata ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
La Plata ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Global Reputation

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

Some Ancient Greek and Twentieth-Century Theories of Value

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-385
Author(s):  
Richard Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Good For ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract Plato puts goodness at the center of all practical thinking but offers no definition of it and implies that philosophy must find one. Aristotle demurs, arguing that there is no such thing as universal goodness. What we need, instead, is an understanding of the human good. Plato and Aristotle are alike in the attention they give to the category of the beneficial, and they agree that since some things are beneficial only as means, there must be others that are non-derivatively beneficial. When G. E. Moore proposed in the early twentieth century that goodness is, as Plato had said, the foundation of ethics, he rejected not only the assumption that goodness needs a definition, but also that goodness is beneficial – that is, good for someone. This article traces the development of this debate as it plays out in the writings of Prichard, Ross, Geach, Thomson, and Scanlon.

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