The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

Conclusions

2018 ◽  
pp. 62-64
Author(s):  
Konstantina Zanou
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
The Common ◽  
Radical Transformation

These three chapters together attempted to answer an ostensibly simple question: why did these three poets and intellectuals, born on the same little island and within a few years of each other, become the ‘national poets’ of two different countries? What does this tell us about the world in which they lived, about the wider issues of their epoch? By reframing their biographies and by highlighting aspects that have been overlooked, I have tried to show how these three microhistories, viewed together, tell us something about the macrohistorical processes unfolding in the Adriatic at the end of the eighteenth and during the first decades of the nineteenth century. These processes involved the transition from the old Venetian Empire to the new empires which by turns appeared and disappeared from the region (the Napoleonic, the Austrian, the Russian, and the British), as well as to the emerging nationalisms and the resulting nation-states. This transition did not signify only the slow and uneven passage from empire to nation-state. It also marked the radical transformation of the concept of ‘patria’, from a cultural and local community into a political and national entity. It meant the gradual reconceptualization of language that was transformed from an index of social mobility into an attribute of national identity, as well as of poetry, which was now reconfigured as committed and national. What is more important, this transition amounted to the dissolution of the common Adriatic space and to the shattering of its Venetian cultural continuum. It meant a shift in political and cultural geographies—in the case of the Ionians, loyalties shifted from the centre that Venice used to be to the centre that Athens was now becoming, while there was an in-between moment when the statelet of the Ionian Islands was configured as an autonomous space. Overall, these processes led to the total restructuring of space and to the tracing of new boundaries between homelands and languages: in the world that was now emerging, a world of mutually exclusive nationalisms, the Adriatic Sea was slowly being transformed from a bridge into a border....

The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs

1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Breckenridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
World Fairs ◽  
International Exhibitions ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Nation State

In the second half of the nineteenth century, objects from India were repeatedly assembled for display at international exhibitions, known then and now as world fairs. Their transience and ephemerality set world fairs apart as extraordinary phenomena in the world of collecting. They are special because, despite the permanence they imply, they do not last; they come and they go. Their buildings are constructed, and then, by international charter, they are deconstructed. They are also special because they place objects in the service of commerce and in the service of the modern nation—state, with the inevitable imperial encounters that these two forces promote. In doing so, they yoke cultural material with aesthetics, politics and pragmatics.

Beyond Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Clive Emsley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
White Men ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Order Maintenance ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
The World ◽  
Police Protection ◽  
The City

This chapter looks at other parts of the world that were mainly absorbed into European empires and what this meant for their experience of policing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonists tended to see native peoples as primitive and without any of their own ‘civilized’ ideas and institutions like police. As a result, and where possible, they increasingly re-created versions of the police in their homelands when they arrived in the virgin lands which they intended either to exploit or to make their new homes. A re-creation of the police deployed in the metropole was claimed to be something towards which the empires were moving, especially during the nineteenth century. It was assumed to be another aspect of the white Europeans’ civilizing process. Yet a police similar to that at home was most often to be found in the colonial towns and cities where white men made the city their own and were seen as requiring the same kind of police protection and order maintenance. The indigenous peoples, especially those living nomadic lifestyles, were thought to require something different, and, while some of the white men deployed to deal with them might be called ‘police’, their organization and behaviour were often far away from Europeans’ behaviour in their lands of origin.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

The Irresistible Rise of Asian Cinema 1

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Pratley
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
New Wave ◽  
World Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Production Activity ◽  
Exciting Development ◽  
Asian Cinema

PRODUCTION ACTIVITY It was not so many years ago it seems when speaking of motion pictures from Asia meant Japanese films as represented by Akira Kurosawa and films from India made by Satyajit Ray. But suddenly time passes and now we are impressed and immersed in the flow of films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea, the Philippines, with Japan a less significant player, and India and Pakistan more prolific than ever in making entertainment for the mass audience. No one has given it a name or described it as "New Wave," it is simply Asian Cinema -- the most exciting development in filmmaking taking place in the world today. In China everything is falling apart yet it manages to hold together, nothing works yet it keeps on going, nothing is ever finished or properly maintained, and yes, here time does wait for every man. But as far...

Contested Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Ideal

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

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