Literary and Historic Flâneuses: Observation, Commentary, Enterprise and Courage in Late-Nineteenth-Century Women’s Professional Lives

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-397
Author(s):  
Leo Hall ◽  
Simon Grennan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract Discussions of the conception of that exemplar of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century urban modernity, the flâneur, have focused on both critique of the figure’s masculinity and more radical and nuanced conceptions of women’s flânerie. This article considers both the re-gendering and ungendering of flânerie in the character of three flâneuses in fiction published in the 1870s, 1880s and 1910s: Madame Sidonie, Henrietta Stackpole, and Elsie Bengough, and related dissonances and synergies in the career and work of London actress and cartoonist Marie Duval, active 1869–1885. It will argue that changes in types of reading supervened upon the boom in the production and distribution of serial publications during this period, resulting in the embodiment of new female professional identities, relative to both changing experiences of urban life and changing experiences of reading. The article makes a distinction between new ideas of these types of urban professional woman and the development of the identity of the New Woman after 1894. It examines the historic comprehensibility of the fictional flâneuses to readers of Zola, James, and Onions, according to the new opportunities and prohibitions that constituted the lived experiences of the developing urban entertainments industry of the period, in Duval’s comic strips and vignettes in the weekly London magazine Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal.

Unbounded Domesticity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Ammen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Home Economics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
New Consumer

This chapter looks at May Irwin’s alignment with domestic feminism as one of her strategies for success. Other actresses used domesticity to promote their professional lives, but Irwin created the most formidable pairing of these two lives. She wrote articles about the importance of women as savers, shoppers, and buyers of real estate in the new consumer capitalism of the late nineteenth century. She extolled motherhood as essential for success as an actress and she became the first celebrity chef when she published her popular cookbook in 1904. The author connects May Irwin to both the older idea of Victorian womanhood and the “New Woman” and considers the effects of the growing business of advertising, the culture of professionalism and the new field of home economics.

scholarly journals The monumental landscape from below: public statues, popular interaction and nationalism in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 722-746
Author(s):  
ANNE PETTERSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Methodological Challenge ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Building Project

ABSTRACT:Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

Striving for a New Exegesis of the Qurʾān

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Pink
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Context ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The article discusses Muslim attempts to develop innovative hermeneutical models for understanding the Qurʾān. It analyses the beginnings of reform in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and the sustained efforts, starting in the late nineteenth century, to bring the interpretation of the Qur’an in line with ideas of rationalism and modernism. On this basis, the chapter presents an overview of the most important modern hermeneutical approaches to the Qur’an, some of which focus on its literary qualities, its historical context, its major themes, or its main goals, while others emphasize the Qurʾān’s inimitability in new ways or seek to expose its immediate relevance for contemporary believers. The development of these new ideas, which have often provoked severe criticism, is situated in the structural context of the emergence of colonial and nation states, mass alphabetization, and new media.

Within Sight: Three-Dimensional Perspectives on Women and Banjos in the Late Nineteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-163
Author(s):  
Lydia Hamessley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Way

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to make the banjo a respectable instrument for ladies. Their overarching aim was to "elevate" the banjo's status from its African-American and minstrel-show associations, thereby making the instrument acceptable in white bourgeois society. At the same time, stereoview cards, three-dimensional photographs produced by the millions, were a popular parlor entertainment featuring a variety of contemporary images, including women playing the banjo. Yet, instead of depicting a genteel lady in the parlor playing her beribboned banjo, the stereoviews presented humorous and sometimes risque scenes of banjo-playing women. Further, virtually no stereoviews exist that show the banjo played by a lady in a parlor setting. Through a study of stereoscopic depictions of women in a variety of scenes, I place these unexpected images of women's music-making in a context that explains their significance. In particular I examine the way stereoviews provide insights about the tensions regarding the position and status of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture as revealed in the figure of the New Woman. Typical of constructions of this threatening figure, stereographic images picture the New Woman wearing bloomers, riding bicycles, attending college, smoking, neglecting her wifely duties and children, and even indulging in lesbian eroticism. Yet, stereoviews are distinctive in that they also show the New Woman playing the banjo, and I argue that the link between the banjo and the New Woman had a decisive and negative impact on the effectiveness of the banjo elevation project. Through an examination of these three-dimensional views, and drawing on late-nineteenth-century writing and poetry about the banjo, I show how the banjo in the hands of the New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. I place this new evidence in the context of Karen Linn's paradigm describing the banjo elevation project as one that sought to shift the banjo from the realm of sentimental values to official values. The figure of the New Woman does not fit within Linn's dichotomy; rather, she falls outside both sets of values. Often viewed as a third sex herself, in a sense mirroring the gender tensions surrounding the banjo, the New Woman helped to shift the banjo into a third realm, that of revolutionary and perhaps even decadent values. This study enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination and furthers our understanding of the complex role women have played in the history of the banjo. Moreover, this evidence demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music, and musical instruments, through powerful iconographic images.

scholarly journals Editorial

Collectivus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
Jorge Gorostiza
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Essential Tool ◽  
Late Nineteenth

La ciudad es uno de los más poderosos y al mismo tiempo más controvertidos artefactos creados por el ser humano. En la actualidad, la mayoría de la humanidad desarrolla su vida cotidiana y trabaja en estos conjuntos de edificaciones y espacios libres diseminados por todo el planeta. El cine y, con él, la denominada imagen en movimiento, nacieron a finales del XIX y se desarrollaron en el siglo pasado, justo cuando las urbes se comenzaban a convertir en las descomunales aglomeraciones donde hoy disfrutamos y sufrimos. En las pantallas cinematográficas se fue mostrando ese crecimiento y en sus ficciones se narraron las transformaciones que iban experimentando los ciudadanos inmersos en las metrópolis; a partir de entonces, el denominado “séptimo arte” se ha convertido en un instrumento imprescindible tanto para analizar el desarrollo de las ciudades, como para proponer alternativas a la vida urbana.AbstractThe city is one of the most powerful and at the same time most controversial artifacts created by the human being. Currently, most of humanity develops its daily life and works in these sets of buildings and open spaces scattered throughout the planet. The cinema and, with it, the so-called moving image, were born in the late nineteenth century and developed in the last century, just when the cities began to become the huge agglomerations where today we enjoy and suffer. In the movie screens that growth was showing and in his fictions were narrated the transformations that were experiencing the citizens immersed in the metropolis; Since then, the so-called "seventh art" has become an essential tool both to analyze the development of cities, and to propose alternatives to urban life.

scholarly journals De nieuwe gids and its Informal Patronage System

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helleke Van den Braber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Professional Writers ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Patronage System

This paper focuses on the funding and finances of <em>De nieuwe gids</em>, a late nineteenth-century periodical believed by many to be the archetypical Dutch cultural magazine. The editors of <em>De nieuwe gids</em> introduced new ways of running their business and had new ideas about their role as professional writers and painters, about the pitfalls of creating for money, and about the relationship between art and finance. The paper argues that they alleviated their uneasy relationship with money through different forms of patronage. The editors acquired a substantial capital from a consortium of eleven backers, and used this money for the continuation of the magazine as well as for the upkeep of those members of their group who had no other resources. They made sure that money was circulated and transferred in such a way that all members profited: artists without money could keep on writing and painting, and artists who did have money invested in the continuity of the group as a whole and in their own place within it. This patronage system was remarkably successful, probably because it did not affect the artistic prestige or credibility of the editors, nor of the benefactors involved.

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