Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 227-234
Author(s):  
James Uden

The book ends with a brief “Afterword,” offering examples of nineteenth-century versions of the “Gothic classicism” traced in this book, and posing the question of how Gothic literature and criticism might help us to reconceive our examinations of the presence of antiquity in contemporary life. After brief accounts of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Coliseum” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, It argues that the notion of “haunting” captures the continuing presence of the classical past better than the current paradigm of “reception,” especially when we aim to analyze aspects of the ancient world with a pernicious legacy in the present.

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baron S. A. Korff

For a long time writers on international law took it for granted that the subject of their studies was a relatively recent product of modern civilization, and that the ancient world did not know any system of international law. If we go back to the literature of the nineteenth century, we can find a certain feeling of pride among internationalists that international law was one of the best fruits of our civilization and that it was a system which distinguished us from the ancient barbarians. Some of these writers paid special attention to this question of origins and endeavored to explain why the ancient world never could have had any international law.


Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins

My own interest in the topics of this book dates back a good many years. In fact, it predates the emergence of the modern field of climate history, or the identification of global warming as an incipient menace. In saying that, I am claiming no status as a prodigy, still less a prophet. Rather, in my teenage years, I read a great deal of speculative fiction, science fiction, in which themes of climate change and cataclysm have long percolated, at least since the latter years of the nineteenth century. We can debate how accurate the scientific analyses or predictions were in many of these works—in many cases, the level of accurate knowledge was minimal—but those works had the inordinate advantage of thinking through the human and cultural consequences of catastrophe, commonly speculating about religious dimensions. Obviously, some works succeeded better than others in that regard, but the essential project was critically important. If we are foretelling that the world will be assailed by lethal menaces, then we cannot fail to go on to imagine what the political or cultural consequences would or should be....


Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz ◽  
Mark Williams

Our attempts to reconstruct the climate of the distant Archaean in Chapter 1 might seem a little like reading a volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace recovered from a burnt-out house. Most of the pages have turned to ash, and only some scattered sentences remain on a few charred pages. The Proterozoic Eon that followed began 2.5 billion years ago, thus is not quite so distant from us in time. We know it a little better than the Archaean—at least a handful of pages from its own book have survived. And this book is long—the Proterozoic lasted nearly two billion years. This is as long as the Hadean and Archaean together, and not far short of half of Earth’s history. Like many a soldier’s account of war, it combined long periods of boredom and brief intervals of terror—or their climatic equivalents, at least. The latter included the most intense glaciations that ever spread across the Earth. Some of these may have converted the planet into one giant snowball. The earliest traces of glaciation on Earth are seen even before the Proterozoic, in rock strata of Archaean age, 2.9 billion years old, near the small South African town of Pongola. These rocks include sedimentary deposits called tillites, which are essentially a jumble of rock fragments embedded in finer sediment. The vivid, old-fashioned term for such deposits is ‘boulder clays’, while the newer and more formal name is ‘till’ for a recent deposit and ‘tillite’ for the hardened, ancient version. Many of the ancient blocks and boulders in the tillites of Pongola are grooved and scratched—a tell-tale sign that they have been dragged along the ground by debris-rich ice. This kind of evidence is among the first ever employed by scientists of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Louis Agassiz and William Buckland, to tell apart ice-transported sediments from superficially similar ones that had formed as boulder-rich slurries when rivers flooded or volcanoes erupted. Ice, then, appeared on Earth in Archaean times.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Balachandran

AbstractThe increased regulation of mobility that accompanied its late nineteenth-century expansion and acceleration is widely recognized. Regulatory practices reached out to distant shores and on board ships, heightening uncertainties and reshaping meanings of voyage and transit, especially for non-white passengers and crews. Travel and mobility are common themes in historical and other literatures. But less is known about experiences of uncertain or thwarted arrivals, involuntary departures, and indefinite transit resulting from practices governing steam-age mobility. People in transit illuminate the conditional openings and closures in such tropes as mobility, transit, and destination. Few spaces embodied and actualized ‘transit’ better than ships, and this article focuses on the role of ships as vessels of confinement. In equal parts about passengers and crews, it explores experiences of nominally free persons uncertainly afloat in a world marked otherwise by assured or accelerated oceanic mobility in three contexts that illustrate physical, political, and cultural constraints on maritime mobility in the age of steam. They are the 1914 voyage of the Komagata-maru, British merchant vessels employing Indian crews, and wartime subjection and resistance of Chinese crews on British and Dutch vessels.


2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-453
Author(s):  
Bas Jongenelen ◽  
Ben Parsons

AbstractThis article offers the first substantial survey of the Middle Dutch satire Dit es de Frenesie since the work of C.P. Serrure in the mid nineteenth century. It contests much of the conventional wisdom surrounding De Frenesie, challenging the poem's usual classification as an early boerde or fabliau. Instead it is argued that the text is an experimental work, which blends together elements of several satiric traditions without committing itself to any one. The implications of this maneuver and others within the text are considered, revealing the poem's clear sympathy with the newly educated and articulate laity. De Frenesie itself is appended in both the original Middle Dutch and an English verse translation.


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.


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