Conclusion

Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh

Conrad’s 1901 short story ‘Amy Foster’ has influenced postcolonial and human rights critics who link it to post-1945 forms of migration. But the story also reveals its indebtedness to the nineteenth-century novel. Published first in a weekly magazine, surrounded by advertisements for colonial commodities and articles about imperial military campaigns, the story draws attention to many of the same issues, and uses the same techniques, as the fictions explored in earlier chapters of the book. That the story also resonates with the conditions of exile faced by refugees in more recent times suggests that the continuing significance of the nineteenth-century novel lies in the way in which it established, and also interrogated, paradigmatic and persistent assumptions about the relationship between human mobility and freedom. While it bears traces of the colonial regimes in which it was produced, another important legacy of the nineteenth-century novel is that it presents us with an analytical frame in which to understand and interrogate the types and patterns of human mobility on which these were built.

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Gillian Mathys

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.


Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Hedin

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (132) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Farah Hafedh Ibrahim

There has always been a belief that women in general are treated oppressively, viewed as inferior to men and subject to personal and institutional discrimination. Since literature reflects the way people think and shows the relationship between linguistic choices and socially construed meanings, this paper tackles Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” through a feminist stylistic approach to find out how female characters are represented. It also aims to explore whether the writer of the text under investigation reinforces or challenges the stereotypical image of women by viewing them as inferior or equal to men. Conducting a feminist stylistic analysis, by utilizing Sara Mills’ (1995) model of analysis involves the employment of a three-tiered level of analysis i.e. the level of the word, the level of the clause and the level of discourse. From the analysis of the short story under investigation, it has been concluded that the way women are represented is socially influenced by the prevailing held beliefs that women are passive, submissive, dependent on men, inferior to and unequal to men.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Vernadakis

In E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of the Siren’ (1920), humility and the humble are highlighted by the empowering status bestowed on an embedded story told by an illiterate Sicilian boatman to a sophisticated English tourist and prospective Cambridge Fellow. The latter, who is also the narrator of the embedding narrative, proves to be transformed by the qualities (philosophic, ethical and literary) promoted by the humble status of the embedded one. As the existence of the Siren of the title is problematic – she never shows up – and the story offers a case of structuring a full intrigue on the invisible, there may be a connection between the humble and the invisible. In order to investigate this assumption, I propose to explore the way in which the myth of the siren, a myth that relates to desire, is brought into dialogue with Frazer’s evolutionary theory and Plato’s theory of ideas. The interplay between philosophy, anthropology and desire provides a critique of Edwardian society and a self-criticism based on Socratic irony, itself an irony of humility. I shall eventually suggest that the humble but desirable Sicilian storyteller functions like an avatar of the Siren. Instead of writing a dissertation on the Deist Controversy and becoming an academic, the homodiegetic narrator allows himself to be seduced by the ‘Siren’s song’ – the young Sicilian’s story – and (ironically) become a writer. For, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the relationship between this short story and the life of E. M. Forster is highlighted by the figure of metalepsis, a device that reveals the author, rather than the narrator, at work.


Author(s):  
Nikolas Rose ◽  
Joelle M. Abi-Rached

This chapter focuses on the question of diagnosis of psychiatric disorders and examines the relationship between neuroscience and psychiatry from this perspective. Despite the penetrating gaze of neuroscience, which has opened up the brain to vision in so many ways, psychiatric classification remains superficial. This neuromolecular vision seems incapable of grounding the clinical work of psychiatry in the way that has become routine in other areas of medicine. Despite the conviction of most practitioners that they deal with conditions that have a corporeal seat in the brain of the afflicted individual, psychiatry has failed to establish the bridge that, from the nineteenth century on, underpinned the epistemology of modern clinical medicine—the capacity to link the troubles of the troubled and troubling individuals who are its subjects with the vital anomalies that underpin them.


Tact ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
David Russell

This introductory chapter outlines some basic claims about tact, the subjects it touches upon, and the way this book is framed. In broadest terms: tact privileges encounters over knowledge, and an aesthetic of handling over more abstract conceptualization or observation—whether of people or objects. Tact can be described as a close and haptic attention to the moment, preferring a present ambivalence to a future perfection. Tact lends itself to political uses just where—in its refusal of assertion—it seems most impertinent to practical ends. It is a literary art that draws upon the particular resources of the essay as form; and it provides the grounds for a claim about the relationship between art and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy. Tact has its origins in a particular time and place, the British nineteenth century, but it is also a more generalizable and available style.


Author(s):  
Walter Flores ◽  
Éloi Laurent ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger

This chapter explores the relationship between well-being and equity, and makes the case for well-being approaches as a powerful pathway to advance equity. In a world without equity, well-being is impossible. Inequities in income, health, education, environmental conditions, access to opportunity, and other factors hinder individual, community, and civic well-being. Pursuing a well-being approach centered on equity—from what gets measured and how, to the way stories are told and the voices that tell them, to what gets prioritized and acted upon and by whom—can reduce these inequities. And in the symbiotic relationship between well-being and equity, as well-being improves, so does equity; likewise, as equity improves, so does well-being. The chapter addresses three intersecting components of well-being and equity: economic equity, human rights, and social cohesion. Through these lenses, it looks at implications and opportunities for social and policy change and illuminates work that remains to be done.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-41
Author(s):  
Jessica Collier

This short article explores the relationship between sexual perversion, as defined by Estela Welldon and illustrated by the late architect and author, Martin Frishman, and the work of the nineteenth-century artist, Aubrey Beardsley. It primarily argues that in both the acting out of sexual perversion and the creation of illustrations considered perverse, there is a shared desire to transform the experience of shame into the experience of fame. In the perpetrating of a perverse sexual offence, the assault can be regarded as an uncontrollable compelling urge for immediate action. Despite knowing this action is wrong, the offender cannot resist the impulse. The action of the assault offers immediate relief from unbearable anxiety and ultimately transfigures shame, however briefly, into fame. In the creation of sexualised and scandalous drawings, it is argued that the feeling of shame is sublimated, and the desire for fame is achieved without the destructive and perverse use of violence. It contemplates how Beardsley’s provocative drawings, in particular his illustrations for Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, may have influenced the aesthetic of Frishman’s images explaining perversion as a manic defence against depression. Lastly, it considers the way in which unconscious societal prejudice may lead to confusion between sexual perversion and sexual difference.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

This essay responds to Julian Wolfreys's suggestion that Oscar Wilde's London is primarily psycho-geographical by seeking to read his texts within the historical and spatial context of late nineteenth-century London. Taking as a test the short story ‘Lord Arthur Saville's Crime’, this essay deploys the critical insights of Henri Lefebvre to suggest that Wilde's city writing engages more closely with London life than has been hitherto suggested. Following Lord Arthur on his three perambulations across the city, from Hyde Park and Piccadilly to Covent Garden, through Soho, and finally from St James's to the Embankment, the article focuses particularly on the ways in which Wilde's use of what might easily be assumed to be an incidental location, namely Cleopatra's Needle, invites us to reread the text's revolutionary politics within the context of the French Revolution. Concluding with a discussion of Wilde's treatment of London's ‘cosmopolitan space’, the essay shows that the way in which seemingly stock imagery deployed in Wilde's representation of the city may in fact be read as part of a wider and complex engagement with both the politics and the aesthetics of space.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document