Finding Melania

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Mediterranean Area ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Mediterranean

Chapter 1 offers a survey of Melania’s life. Coerced into marriage by her parents, who wished for descendants to inherit the family fortune, she and her young husband, Valerius Pinianus (Pinian), produced two children. When both children died, she persuaded Pinian to join her in a life of ascetic renunciation. They, along with her widowed mother, Albina, abandoned Rome shortly before the Gothic invasion and traversed the Mediterranean area, founding monasteries in North Africa and Jerusalem. Toward the end of her life, she traveled from Jerusalem to Constantinople in the hope of converting her still-pagan uncle, who was on a mission to the eastern court. Returning to Jerusalem, she died in 439 CE. This chapter details the discovery and publication of two versions of her Life in the early twentieth century, along with conclusions regarding its authorship. It also notes other ancient textual sources concerning Melania; the genre of hagiography; women’s roles in early Christianity as martyrs, patrons, pilgrims, and ascetics; and education and literacy in late antiquity.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

Lunatic Forms

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-86
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Character Types

Chapter 1 examines derivation and re-animation in Djuna Barnes’s early-twentieth-century lyric novel, Nightwood, focusing on redeployed aesthetic figures: the sleepwalker, the unstoppable narrator, the animate statue. It shows how Barnes’s resurrection of character types is informed by the genre-fusing innovations of the commedia dell’arte. It reads Barnes in dialogue with both Laforgue’s and Verlaine’s development of the Pierrot-figure, and the sad and ominous clowns in grotesque theatre, which inform Chaplin’s Tramp and Beckett’s clowns, as well as Barnes’s characterization of the ‘doctor’. Does Nightwood cast its characters in stone, locking them into old, ritualized narrative strategies? Or are these types themselves on the move; re-animating generations of performances and forms, from Shakespeare’s bawdy, to Rabelais’s carnivalesque, to Aphra Behn’s moon-philosopher, Doctor Balierdo?

The Growth and Dissolution of a Large-Scale Business Enterprise

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Boyce
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Financial Structure ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Business Enterprise ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World

This book is an in-depth case study of the Furness Withy and Co Shipping Group, which operated both tramp and liner services and was one of the five major British shipping groups of the early twentieth century. It demonstrates how British shipowners of this period generated success by exploring Christopher Furness’ career in relation to the social, political, and cultural currents during a time of tremendous shipping growth in Britain and the establishment of some of the largest shipping firms in the world. It approaches the study from three angles. The first analyses how the Furness Group expanded its shipping activities and became involved with the industrial sector. The second illustrates the organisational and financial structure of the enterprise. Finally, the Group’s leadership and entrepreneurship is scrutinised and placed within the wider context of twentieth century British business. The case study begins in 1870, with an introduction explaining how Christopher Furness came to join the family company, Thomas Furness and Co. in order develop services, expand, and instigate the changes and mergers that brought the Furness Group into existence. There are thirteen chronologically presented chapters, a bibliography, and seven appendices of data including an ownership timeline, tonnage statistics, acquisitions, a list of maritime associates, and a timeline of Christopher Furness’ life. The book concludes in 1919 with the de-merging of the Furness Group’s shipping and industrial holdings, the resignation of the Furness family from the company’s board, the sale of their shares, and the move into managing the firm’s industrial interests.

Introduction

2015 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ada Rapoport-Albert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Feminist Revolution ◽  
Scholarly Discourse

This chapter looks at the notion of how the hasidic movement brought about a feminist revolution in Judaism. It mentions the twentieth-century historian of Hasidism named S. A. Horodetsky, who first claimed that the Hasidic movement endowed women with complete equality in the religious life that are expressed in a variety of hasidic innovations. It also discusses women's direct, personal relationship with the rebbe or tsadik that established a new equality between the sexes within the family and the community. The chapter covers the breakdown of the educational barrier of Hebrew and the language of traditional scholarly discourse in the male world of Torah learning. It argues how hasidism has remained predominantly the preserve of men in the early twentieth century.

The neglect of desire

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-61
Author(s):  
Sam Hole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Chapter 1 examines the intellectual, ecclesial, and wider cultural context underpinning the diverse modern interpretations of John’s thought. Twentieth-century studies of John, for all their methodological variety, have been dominated by three traditions of interpretation that have only grasped partial elements in his teaching, important though these elements are. These traditions have emphasized the importance of ‘affectivity’ in the spiritual life, the meanings of ‘mysticism’ or ‘mystical experience’, and the theological significance of John’s poetic language. Each strand of thought, however, originates from particular early twentieth-century theological and philosophical commitments whose legacy continues to inform present-day reading of John. Recognition of the extent to which previous works have been shaped by disciplinary boundaries that took their shape in the last century enables a renewed appreciation of John’s theology on its own terms. Through this insight aspects of his work that have all too often been split between spirituality, mysticism, literary studies, and theological anthropology—in particular, his creative reworking of the notion of desire—may be better appreciated.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Division ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

Chapter 1 focuses on the distinctiveness of the ‘linguistic turns’ of early twentieth-century Europe, differentiating them from nineteenth-century work on language and insisting on the need to think of these multiple turns as a whole, as a constellation across Europe. That there is such a constellation, demanding our attention, is the first of the book’s three organizing claims. The second is that language draws such a crowd because crowds have become a problem: in the linguistic turns of the early twentieth century, language is a metonym for problems of social order and social division, democracy and consent, nationality and difference. Hence the third claim: that the distinguishing feature of these linguistic turns is a commitment to some version of ‘language as such’, a force or structure within language that can provide the vitality, the order, the lucidity, or some combination of these, necessary to cure language of its present ills.

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