Flower, J. F., Literature and the Left in France: Society, Politics and the Novel since the Late Nineteenth Century. Pp. xvii + 216. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Paperbound £5.95

1987 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
LUDMYLLA MENDES LIMA

<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>O presente artigo trata de analisar o modo particular como Machado de Assis constrói a representação dos fatos históricos brasileiros no romance <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. Este romance traz em seu enredo dois importantes fatos históricos ocorridos no final do século XIX: a Abolição da Escravatura, em 1888 e a Proclamação da República, em 1889. O tratamento literário dado pelo autor aos fatos, imprimindo irrelevância aos mesmos no contexto do enredo, revela que para ser Realista ‘à brasileira’, naquelas circunstâncias específicas, era necessário mostrar o curso da História tendo como base a ausência de transformação.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó</em> – História do Brasil.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>This paper intends to analyze the special way Machado de Assis builds the representation of Brazilian historical facts in the novel <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. This novel brings in its plot two important historical events that happened in the late Nineteenth century: the Abolition of Slavery, in 1888; and the Proclamation of the Republic, in 1889. The literary treatment given by the author to the events, printing irrelevance to them, in the context of the plot, reveals that to build a Brazilian realism, in those circumstances, it was necessary to show the course of history based on the absence of transformation.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó –</em> Brazilian History.</p>


Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 722-746
Author(s):  
ANNE PETTERSON

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.


PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.


2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-107
Author(s):  
Deak Nabers

The realist novel has long been understood in terms of its representation of the diffusion of political agency into social and economic practices. This essay claims that realism, at least as it emerged in the work of late-nineteenth-century American writers such as William Dean Howells, does not record this process of diffusion so much as anatomize it, and that novels like A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) participated in a widespread and multivalent effort, in American law and literature alike, to specify the proper boundaries of the state's authority in relation other increasingly visible forms of social and economic coercion.


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