Cubes

Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock

Chapter 4 focuses on the work of Charles Howard Hinton, author of the first Scientific Romances and the least well-known yet most influential theorist of higher space of the late nineteenth century. ‘Hinton was an important mediating figure,’ writes Steven Connor, ‘because, like some of the physical scientists who investigated Spiritualism, his grasp of scientific principles was extensive and subtle.’ Indeed, his work fed into the literature of occult groupings, avant-garde art, Modernist poetry and fiction, and also back into geometry and orthodox science. ‘Cubes’ give a detailed account of Hinton’s work, highlighting his acknowledged and implied sources, Kepler, Kant, and his father, before focusing on his invention of a system of cubes for training the subject in the visualization of higher space. This set of cubes are read as ‘quasi-objects’, things that make fluid the distinction between thinking thing and thing thought on, between mind and material object.

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


Modern Italy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-419
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Bruner

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.


Author(s):  
Irene Gammel

The term "avant-garde" has a double meaning, denoting first, the historical movements that started in the late nineteenth century and ended in the 1920s and 1930s, and second, the ongoing practices of radical innovation in art, literature, and fashion in the later twentieth century (often inspired by the historical avant-garde and referred to as the neo-avant-garde). Within the context of modernism, historical avant-garde movements (such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Anarchism, and Constructivism) radicalized innovations in aesthetic forms and content, while also engaging viewers and readers in deliberately shocking new ways. Locked in a dialectical relationship between the avant-garde and modernism, as Richard Murphy has written (1999: 3), the historical avant-garde accelerated the advent of modernism, which routinely appropriated and repackaged avant-garde experimentation in tamer forms. As the Latinate term "avant-garde" took root first France and Italy, and later in Germany and English-speaking countries, the trajectory of the avant-garde’s relationship with, or opposition to, modernism has been theorized in a myriad of different, even conflicting, ways across different cultures. Is the avant-garde an extension of, or a synonym for, modernism (as suggested in some early American criticism) or are the two concepts in opposition to each other (as proposed in Italian and Spanish criticism)?


Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.


2019 ◽  
pp. 70-81
Author(s):  
Anelys Alvarez

Art historian Anelys Alvarez reviews the tumultuous first three decades of the Cuban Republic (1902–30) and their impact on painting and other visual arts such as sculpture. First, she questions the conventional dichotomy between traditional (or academic) and avant-garde (or modernist) art in Cuba during this period. She then recovers several forgotten artists, such as Antonio Rodríguez Morey, María Capdevila, and Manuel Mesa, who were active on the island before the rise of modernism in the 1930s. Alvarez reappraises a whole generation of painters who served as an artistic bridge between the late nineteenth century and the first generation of avant-garde (vanguardista) painters in 1927.


2019 ◽  
pp. 443-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter discusses the development of tort law in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tort law experienced its biggest growth spurt in the late nineteenth century. The legal world began to sit up and pay attention. The very first English-language treatise on torts appeared in 1859: Francis Hilliard’s book, The Law of Torts, Or Private Wrongs. Then came Charles G. Addison, Wrongs and Their Remedies in 1860, in England. By 1900, there was an immense literature on the law of torts; Joel Bishop and Thomas M. Cooley had written imposing treatises on the subject; the case law had swollen to heroic proportions. Tort law was a product of the industrial revolution; England here had a head start; problems emerged there first, and so did their tentative legal solutions.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Andrew E. Clark-Huckstep

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality has been the subject of debate among historians for decades. More specifically, his assertion, ‘the sodomite was a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species,’ has been used to support an ‘acts-to-identity’ theory that locates in the late-nineteenth century a shift in thinking about sexuality. The author argues that a re-reading of Foucault shifts the focus of historical inquiry from identities towards the process of knowledge creation, allowing for ambiguity that the concept ‘identity’ might foreclose. This essay examines the debate and offers a new reading of Foucault based on the work of Lynne Huffer. Finally, the author seeks to centre a source-driven approach in conjunction with The History of Sexuality, providing readings of patients and informants from the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 115-141
Author(s):  
Etty Terem

This article examines a fatwa written in the late nineteenth century by Jaʿfar b. Idrīs al-Kattānī, a distinguished Moroccan legal scholar. The issue that gave rise to the fatwa was the subject of heated debates among Moroccan Muslims at the time: the legality of using goods manufactured by non-Muslims. New historical conditions brought by Moroccan modernity eroded religious and communal boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims and accentuated concerns about the integrity of Islam. Suspicion and anxiety of the population found expression in widespread rumors about impurities in products manufactured by non-Muslims. By analyzing al-Kattānī’s fatwa, this article aims to offer insights into the relationships between theʿulamāʾ, Islamic tradition, and modernity.


1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene W. Ridings

‘No one is unaware,’ stated Brazil's Minister of Finance Ruj Barbosa in 1891, ‘that commerce, especially large-scale commerce, in our most important trade centers resides in greatest part, not to say in its near entirety, in the hands of foreigners.’ Rui was calling attention to a situation of increasing concern to Brazilian leaders: the preponderance of foreigners in big business. Another Brazilian Minister of Finance, Felisbello Freire, remarked on the subject in 1894, ‘to my mind this phenomenon is an indication of a subjugation which, dating from colonial times, threatens the annulment of native commerce.’.


1991 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 409-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wright

Olden Times in Zululand and Natal …depends primarily on tribal lore garnered during four decades of exhaustive interviews with native elders.…[I]t is safe to say [Bryant's] work will never be exceeded. Almost everything published on the subject since depends on him.…This paper needs to be read against the background of the critique which has gradually been gathering force over the last half-dozen years or so of the concept of the mfecane. By the mfecane is meant the idea that in the 1820s much of the eastern half of southern Africa was thrown into turmoil by a series of wars and population migrations set in motion by the explosive expansion of the Zulu state under Shaka. Ever since Theal first popularized it in the late nineteenth century, this idea has remained one of the bedrock concepts around which the history of southern Africa in the later eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century has been written. The term mfecane itself did not become widely used until as recently as 1966, when, in his widely influential book, The Zulu Aftermath, Omer-Cooper repackaged what had previously been called “the wars of Shaka” for an emerging Africanist readership. Since then the concept of the mfecane has permeated the literature, both popular and academic, inside and outside southern Africa, to the point where it is regarded as a fixed fact of the sub-continent's history.


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