Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Damien B. Schlarb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Higher Criticism

This chapter explains the book’s central arguments, provides background, and theorizes its approach to literature. It shows how Old Testament wisdom philosophy informs Melville’s response to the manifold crises of modernity, specifically the loss of religious certainty and biblical authority. It explicates the book’s argument that Melville’s response can help us understand the dynamics at play in this crisis by providing historical and contextual background: first, it inscribes Melville into a transnational theological conversation about biblical interpretation that lasts from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century; second, it outlines the American reception of new analytical methods such as higher criticism, surveys America’s intellectual infrastructure, and discusses how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by theological scholarship. Finally, it defines “wisdom” and “religious skepticism” and explains its approach to literary criticism as informed by a hermeneutic theory of contemplation (theology) and by postsecular as well as postcritical approaches (literary studies).

Creation, Fall and Political Order — Prussian Conservatism and the Old Testament

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Laura C. Achtelstetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars

Abstract This article examines differences within the theological basis of early nineteenth-century Prussian conservatism. By exploring the usage of the Old Testament in the writings of conservative thought leaders Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, and Friedrich Julius Stahl, this article contributes to scholarship of both traditions of biblical interpretation and that of the relation of theology and political theory. The focus of this article centers on three concepts of the Old Testament and their implementation in conservative political doctrine. I will discuss Hengstenberg’s concept of biblical historicity and unity of Scripture, Gerlach’s use of the Old Testament as the source of a role model for just religious wars and a theocratic concept of law, as well as Stahl’s bible-based political philosophy of history and the resulting model of political order. Thus, the basis for different, resulting concepts of church, state, and nation that were merged into an overall religion-based political conservative doctrine in pre-1848 Prussia are analyzed.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH EGYPTOLOGY

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1083-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID GANGE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.

Biblical Criticism in the Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 342-358
Author(s):  
William Johnstone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
William Robertson

Against the background of the Enlightenment and the weakening of the restrictions imposed by the Westminster Confession, this chapter seeks to trace the development of biblical interpretation in Scotland in the nineteenth century, in terms of the evolution of ‘lower criticism’ focusing on philological and textual evidence and of ‘higher criticism’ aiming to identify the social and historical contexts within which the biblical writers operated. The chapter begins with the pioneering work of Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) and considers Scottish participation in the culmination of ‘lower criticism’ in the production of the Revised Version (1870–95) and of ‘higher criticism’ in the work especially of William Robertson Smith (1846–94).

“Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies”: Archaeology and the Popularization of Old Testament Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Britain

1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Zink Machaffie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
The University

Historians of the development of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century have normally treated this aspect of intellectual history as a preserve of the university don and the ambitious cleric. However, further study points to a movement of considerable magnitude and momentum beginning in the last decades of that century which aimed at popularizing the methods and results of the higher criticism of the Old Testament. Widespread popular recognition of a critical approach to the Old Testament and its implications began in the 1860s in response to the work of J. W. Colenso and the contributors to Essays and Reviews.

Biblical Authority and the Impact of Higher Criticism in Irish Presbyterianism, ca. 1850–1930

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Church Organization ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
German States ◽  
The Impact

The decades between 1850 and 1930 saw traditional understandings of Christianity subjected to rigorous social, intellectual, and theological criticism across the transatlantic world. Unprecedented urban and industrial expansion drew attention to the shortcomings of established models of church organization while traditional Christian beliefs concerning human origins and the authority of Scripture were assailed by new approaches to science and biblical higher criticism. In contradistinction to lower or textual criticism, higher criticism dealt with the development of the biblical text in broad terms. According to James Strahan, professor of Hebrew at Magee College, Derry, from 1915 to 1926, textual criticism aimed “at ascertaining the genuine text and meaning of an author” while higher “or historical, criticism seeks to answer a series of questions affecting the composition, editing and collection of the Sacred Books.” During the nineteenth century, the controversy over the use of higher critical methods focused for the most part upon the Old Testament. In particular, critics dismissed the Mosaic authorship and unity of the Pentateuch, arguing that it was the compilation of a number of early documentary fragments brought together by priests after the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C. This “documentary hypothesis” is most often associated with the German scholar, Julius Wellhausen. Indeed, higher criticism had been fostered in the extensive university system of the various German states, which encouraged original research and the emergence of a professional intellectual elite. It reflected the desire of liberal theologians to adapt the Christian faith to the needs and values of modern culture, particularly natural science and history.

العربية المقاربة المقاصديّة في ردّ ابن فودي على القادح في جلستهم الدعويّة

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alawiye Abdulmumin Abdurrazzaq ◽  
Ahmad Wifaq Mokhtar ◽  
Abdul Manan Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Analytical Methods ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Subject

This article is aimed to examine the extent of the application of Islamic legal objectives by Sheikh Abdullah bn Fudi in his rejoinder against one of their contemporary scholars who accused them of being over-liberal about the religion. He claimed that there has been a careless intermingling of men and women in the preaching and counselling gathering they used to hold, under the leadership of Sheikh Uthman bn Fudi (the Islamic reformer of the nineteenth century in Nigeria and West Africa). Thus, in this study, the researchers seek to answer the following interrogations: who was Abdullah bn Fudi? who was their critic? what was the subject matter of the criticism? How did the rebutter get equipped with some guidelines of higher objectives of Sharĩʻah in his rejoinder to the critic? To this end, this study had tackled the questions afore-stated by using inductive, descriptive and analytical methods to identify the personalities involved, define and analyze some concepts and matters considered as the hub of the study.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Mental Acts ◽  
The Relationship

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.

Hebrew School in Nineteenth-Century Bombay: Protestant Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of India's Bene Israel Community

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1764-1808 ◽  
Author(s):  
MITCH NUMARK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Hebrew School ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Bene Israel ◽  
Jewish Liturgy

AbstractThis paper is a study of cultural interaction and diffusion in colonial Bombay. Focusing on Hebrew language instruction, it examines the encounter between India's little-known Bene Israel Jewish community and Protestant missionaries. Whilst eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cochin Jews were responsible for teaching the Bene Israel Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, the Bene Israel acquired Hebrew and Biblical knowledge primarily from nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Bene Israel community was a Konkan jati with limited knowledge of Judaism. However, by the end of the century the community had become an Indian-Jewish community roughly analogous to other Jewish communities. This paper explores how this transformation occurred, detailing the content, motivation, and means by which British and American missionaries and, to a lesser extent, Cochin Jews instructed the Bene Israel in Jewish knowledge. Through a critical examination of neglected English and Marathi sources, it reconstructs the Bene Israel perspective in these encounters and their attitude towards the Christian missionaries who laboured amongst them. It demonstrates that the Bene Israel were active participants and selective consumers in their interaction with the missionaries, taking what they wanted most from the encounter: knowledge of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. Ultimately, the instruction the Bene Israel received from Protestant missionaries did not convert them to Christianity but strengthened and transformed their Judaism.

Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography

2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brittan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Personal Writing ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
Mental Pathology ◽  
Newspaper Articles

Both the literary program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and his personal letters dating from the year of the work's composition are suffused with the rhetoric of illness, detailing a maladie morale characterized by melancholy, nervous "exultation," black presentiments, and a malignant idee fixe.. Often mistakenly identified as a term new to the 1830s, the idee fixe has a considerably longer history, dating from the first decade of the nineteenth century when it appeared in the writings of French psychiatrists Etienne Esquirol and Jean-Etienne Georget. Both Esquirol's early writings on insanity and his seminal 1838 treatise identify mental "fixation" as the primary symptom of monomania, the most contentious and well-known mental disease of the period, and one with far-reaching implications not only for medicine but for Romantic literature, philosophy, and autobiography. Examination of the disease's early reception reveals that, well before Berlioz, the psychiatric terminology surrounding monomania had been absorbed into popular discourse. Malignant and humorous idee fixes appeared in cartoons, diaries, and newspaper articles from the 1810s onward, and in fictional works by Hoffmann, Duras, Scribe, Balzac, and others. Here, and in essays published in musical and literary journals of the period, monomania emerged as an increasingly aestheticized malady, and the idee fixe itself as a signal, not of mental debilitation, but of creative absorption and artistic inspiration. When Berlioz figured himself as a monomaniac, both in his personal writing and his symphonic program, he was responding to a discourse of "creative aberration" permeating Romantic literary and medical culture, and to a fashionable fascination with mental pathology. Berlioz was by no means the only artist of the period to diagnose himself with the symptoms of mental fixation. Musset, Janin, and Georges Sand also described themselves in monomaniacal terms in autobiographical "confessions" permeated with references to hallucination, fixation, and emotional pathology. Indeed, we can draw clear parallels between the veiled self-referentiality of the Fantastique and the autobiographical strategies of the Romantic Confession. Berlioz's "self-sounding" resonates with a host of other confessional autobiographies of the period and reflects the collapse between inspiration and insanity, between anatomy and aesthetics, underpinning early-nineteenth-century theories of genius.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document