Walter Scott’s Long-Distance Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-69
Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Constituent Element ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Displaced People ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
British Culture ◽  
British People

Innovations in novelistic form that appear at the end of the Napoleonic Wars do so in the context of a national discussion about colonial emigration, and an uprooting and dispersing of British people on a profound scale, that provoked a reimagining of global space. Poverty, unemployment, and security, both domestically and in the colonies, were concerns about which emigration was proposed as a possible solution. This helps to explain two influential formal innovations made by Walter Scott in Guy Mannering (1815). The first is the invention of a new geographical imaginary. The novel is distinctive for its international backstory that takes place in India outside the main temporal and geographical frames of the novel, as well as a mode of calibrating distance in relation to details of size and scale, and through manipulating levels of readerly attention. The second innovation is its eccentric character, the gypsy, Meg Merrilies, who specifically derives from these spatial concerns. Her character is especially topical as it draws on contemporary beliefs about gypsies, a displaced people thought to have originated in India, but who are also identified with Scottish peasants displaced during the Highland Clearances, and other indigenous displaced people. Through the character of Meg, the novel examines contemporary questions about property, place, and belonging, as well as race and indigeneity. Meg’s persistence in print culture through the next several decades, reimagined in theatrical renditions, poems, print commodities, and travel writings, turns her into a celebrity character, and constituent element of a migratory British culture.

Assimilating the Novel: Reviews and Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
British Culture

This chapter looks at the novel's assimilation into British culture between 1750 and 1820. During this period, the vast majority of theories and histories of the novel were introduced not through formal critical studies like John Dunlop's The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age (1814), but rather through an array of other publications that helped constitute print culture in these years. Of these other acts of publishing, the chapter focuses on the activities of eighteenth-century literary reviews and anthologies, particularly on large reprinted collections of novels published after 1774.

Germaine de Staël’s and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
New Information

This chapter describes the emergence of the terminology of improvisation in the English language. Terms relating to improvisation began to appear in the eighteenth century and came to be used frequently in the nineteenth. Germaine de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne ou L’Italie (published in French and translated into English the same year) was an important part of this emergence of improvisation. By attending to the content and language of Corinne, including the novel’s earliest translations, the chapter argues that the novel helped create a sense of improvisation as an Italianate artistic practice with political overtones specific to the context of the Napoleonic Wars. For the Staëlian improviser, art and history alike progress not toward pre-ordained goals but by taking new information into account and improvising new ends.

scholarly journals The movement ecology of seagrasses

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1795) ◽  
pp. 20140878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn McMahon ◽  
Kor-jent van Dijk ◽  
Leonardo Ruiz-Montoya ◽  
Gary A. Kendrick ◽  
Siegfried L. Krauss ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Clonal Growth ◽  
Movement Ecology ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Scales ◽  
Life History Stages ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Time Movement

A movement ecology framework is applied to enhance our understanding of the causes, mechanisms and consequences of movement in seagrasses: marine, clonal, flowering plants. Four life-history stages of seagrasses can move: pollen, sexual propagules, vegetative fragments and the spread of individuals through clonal growth. Movement occurs on the water surface, in the water column, on or in the sediment, via animal vectors and through spreading clones. A capacity for long-distance dispersal and demographic connectivity over multiple timeframes is the novel feature of the movement ecology of seagrasses with significant evolutionary and ecological consequences. The space–time movement footprint of different life-history stages varies. For example, the distance moved by reproductive propagules and vegetative expansion via clonal growth is similar, but the timescales range exponentially, from hours to months or centuries to millennia, respectively. Consequently, environmental factors and key traits that interact to influence movement also operate on vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Six key future research areas have been identified.

Hypertextuality and the Economic Novel in Zimbabwe

Matatu ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-415
Author(s):  
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Great Ease ◽  
New Type ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
Source Of Information

Abstract Recent surges and advances in the popular use of electronic technology such as Internet, email, iPad, iPhone, and touch-screens in Africa have opened up great communicative possibilities among ordinary people whose voices were previously marginalized in traditional elitist media. People far apart geographically and living in different times can communicate rapidly and with great ease. This technological revolution has challenged and broken down boundaries of dependence on television, newspapers, and novels, the traditional forms of communication. It is now possible to upload a novel onto an iPad and read it as one moves from place to place. The burden of carrying hard copies is relieved but not eradicated; in most African countries, including Zimbabwe (the centre of focus in the present article), the creative work of art or hard copy of a novel is still relied upon as source of information. There are creative, experimental innovations in the novel form in Zimbabwe which to some extent can justify one’s speaking of a hypertextual novel. This new type of novel incorporates multiple narratives, and sometimes deliberately uses genres such as the email form as a constitutive narrative style that confirms as well as destabilizes previous assumptions of single coherent stories told from one point of view. Using the concepts of hypertextuality, intertextuality, and Bakhtin’s notions of carnivalesque and heteroglossia in speech and written utterances, this article reconsiders the implications of the presence of ideologies of hypertextuality in one novel from Zimbabwe, Nyaradzo Mtizira’s The Chimurenga Protocol (2008). The article argues that the multiplicity of narratives constitutes the hypertextual dimension of the novelistic form.

Yemen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the development of the novel genre in Yemen. The novelistic form has taken a relatively long time to emerge in Yemen, but since 1992 Yemeni writers have produced a number of remarkable novels and the pace of publishing has increased. In addition, scholarly criticism of Yemeni fiction as a distinctive regional tradition has gotten well underway within the last decade. This chapter begins with an overview of the beginnings of the Yemeni novel before turning to works published from the revolution to unification (1962–1990), including historical novels. It also considers novels published from unification to the present, noting that Yemeni authors through the years have tackled a range of themes, including emigration, exile, racism, Muslim-Jewish relations, and cultural pluralism.

scholarly journals Tilsynekomstens politik. Om virkelighedsmodellering i Joseph Conrads Nostromo

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (111) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Jonas Kjærgård Laursen
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Politics And Literature ◽  
Ideological Criticism ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Politics Of Literature ◽  
Material Interests ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Novelistic Form

POLITICS OF APPEARANCE. ON REALITY MODELLING IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOSTROMOArtistically Nostromo is arguably the most ambitious of Joseph Conrad’s novels. It is also without a doubt the most explicitly political in that it openly engages with the question of how capitalism, imperialism, and revolution affect the human consciousness. There is however no agreement as to how this political problem is to be understood or, more precisely, what kind of understanding of the interrelationship between politics and literature is necessary when engaging this artwork. As a necessary supplement to both a 60’s Marxist reading and readings from the 70’s and 80’s dealing with ideological criticism, this article suggests a reading focusing on how the text creates a model of society by reconfiguring certain real life elements. By developing a specific artistic idiom Nostromo attempts to show the very limited view of the whole of society caused by, in the wording of the novel, the material interests of imperial capitalism. Under the inspiration of both Jurij Lotman and Jacques Rancière the analysis presented here is able to address some key political insights that appear as a consequence of the novelistic form when understood as a relatively autonomous model of society. And that is what is meant by the expression politics of appearance: the politics of literature is to be analysed as something generated by the specific gestalt of the text, as something that comes into sight with – and only with – the text.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

scholarly journals “I cannot act!”: Fanny’s “Inaction” in the Economic Ideology Driving Mansfield Park

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan O'Neil
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Inherent Value ◽  
Economic Ideology ◽  
Profit Value ◽  
British Culture

In early 19th century British culture, an ideology founded on economics permeates one of society’s most private affairs marriage between two individuals. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the characters become a type of currency to be exchanged through marriage in order for others to gain power and wealth. Fanny Price, subjected to this objectification, comes to realize the inherent value that she possesses as a woman. Once she is given agency in the novel, she is able to live beyond the ideology of the novel. Her marriage allows her to recognize herself as being equal to her husband, Edmund Bertram, and join him in ownership of their property. Fanny and Edmund represent a new ideology that is founded on love and equality, rather than profit value. 

Al-Shidyaq’s Decadent Carnival

2020 ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
David Fieni
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Semitic Languages ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Novelistic Form

This chapter shows how al-Shidyaq’s novel, Al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq (Leg Over Leg), produces a radical critique of the supposed philological decadence of the Arabic language. The text does this through a carnivalization of Arabic, where the author generates the kind of ambivalence that is constitutive of the category of grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s account of the carnivalesque. By articulating the subaltern status of Arabs under Ottoman rule in a language marked by dynamism, excess, and proliferation, al-Shidyaq is able to make powerlessness and disease signify awakening and renaissance. The novel challenges the Eurocentric origins of the novelistic form while simultaneously disproving, in raucous fashion, both the Orientalist thesis of the decadence of Semitic languages and cultures and the self-diagnosis of the Arab nahda that sought to cleanse Arabic of tradition to modernize it.

Maintaining the Family

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirita Frigren
Keyword(s):  
West Coast ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Family ◽  
Peripheral Position ◽  
Ready Availability ◽  
Grand Duchy

After the Napoleonic Wars Finnish ship owners increasingly contributed to global trade by selling their tonnage capacity internationally. In spite of its peripheral position as a Grand Duchy within Imperial Russia (since 1809), Finland played an important part in the traffic of the high seas during the late age of sail, largely due to the ready availability of labour. In this chapter, I study how long-distance trade affected sailors’ families in Pori on Finland’s west coast between 1830 and 1860. I show how boundaries of biological kinship were crossed in housing arrangements families made to ensure social and economic security, and how the community supported and dealt with these families.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document