Rethinking Mendelssohn

Rethinking Mendelssohn offers a new perspective on Felix Mendelssohn’s music and aesthetics, arguing for a fresh understanding of the composer, his music, and its central relationship to nineteenth-century culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, the present book sets a new tone for research on Mendelssohn. It challenges the traditional modes of discourse about this composer in moving beyond rehabilitation and source studies to engage in rigorous criticism and analysis, seeking to rethink the issues that shaped Mendelssohn, his music, and its reception from his own day to the present. This volume includes contributions from younger, emerging scholars as well as from some of the most prominent figures outside specialist Mendelssohn circles in order to open up new ways of understanding the composer and set out future directions in Mendelssohn studies. Besides offering fresh accounts of some of his most familiar orchestral pieces, particular attention is given here to Mendelssohn’s contested views on the relationship between art and religion, the analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song tradition.

1969 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Barker

No socialist since Robert Owen has had any excuse for being unaware of the relationship between educational reform and social and political change, and a perception of this relationship was a feature of nineteenth century socialism and liberalism. The attention which the educational principles and policies of socialist, labour, and radical movements in Europe have recently received has thus been well deserved. The socialists have however come off better than those organisations which have been designated as merely “labour”, and two valuable contributions to the literature dealing with Great Britain – Professor Simon's Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920, and Dr Reid's article on the Socialist Sunday Schools – are concerned with the programmes and beliefs of left wing socialist bodies, rather than with those of the ideologically more diffuse but politically more important Labour Party. Both these contributions may perhaps profitably be placed in a new perspective by an examination of the attitudes adopted within the Labour Party and within its industrial half-brother the Trades Union Congress, to the problems raised by the content and character, as opposed to the structure and organisation, of the education available to the working class.


Author(s):  
Edward Armston-Sheret ◽  
Kim Walker

Abstract This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers’ descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tekieli ◽  
Marion Festing ◽  
Xavier Baeten

Abstract. Based on responses from 158 reward managers located at the headquarters or subsidiaries of multinational enterprises, the present study examines the relationship between the centralization of reward management decision making and its perceived effectiveness in multinational enterprises. Our results show that headquarters managers perceive a centralized approach as being more effective, while for subsidiary managers this relationship is moderated by the manager’s role identity. Referring to social identity theory, the present study enriches the standardization versus localization debate through a new perspective focusing on psychological processes, thereby indicating the importance of in-group favoritism in headquarters and the influence of subsidiary managers’ role identities on reward management decision making.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner ◽  
Alan Bale

We review advances in the experimental study of the mass-count distinction and highlight problems that have emerged. First, we lay out what we see to be the scientific enterprise of studying the syntax and semantics of mass-count distinction, and the assumptions we believe must be made if additional progress is to occur, especially as the empirical facts continue to grow in number and complexity. Second, we discuss the new landscape of cross-linguistic results that has been created by widespread use of the quantity judgment task, and what these results tell us about the nature of the mass-count distinction. Finally, we discuss the relationship between the mass-count distinction and non-linguistic cognition, and in particular the object-substance distinction.


Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.


Author(s):  
Bruno and

Multisensory interactions in perception are pervasive and fundamental, as we have documented throughout this book. In this final chapter, we propose that contemporary work on multisensory processing is a paradigm shift in perception science, calling for a radical reconsideration of empirical and theoretical questions within an entirely new perspective. In making our case, we emphasize that multisensory perception is the norm, not the exception, and we remark that multisensory interactions can occur early in sensory processing. We reiterate the key notions that multisensory interactions come in different kinds and that principles of multisensory processing must be considered when tackling multisensory daily-life problems. We discuss the role of unisensory processing in a multisensory world, and we conclude by suggesting future directions for the multisensory field.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document