Scrutinizing the Present Phase of Human History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
World View ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human History ◽  
Historical Writing

This chapter examines the range of F. R. Leavis’s historical thinking, from the early work of his Ph.D. through to his post-1945 dealings with the nineteenth century. The chapter argues that, rather than being largely derived from Eliot’s work, Leavis’s thinking drew on older and more conventional strains of historical writing whose framework he never entirely shook off. It emphasizes the extent to which Leavis believed that a proper cultural history would yield an evaluative assessment of the quality of human living in various periods and hence an overall judgement about progress or decline. It shows that the two key periods in Leavis’s scheme were the seventeenth century, understood as the beginnings of the modern world, and the nineteenth century, seen as the triumph of a broadly mechanical and economistic world view that he tended to equate with ‘Utilitarianism’.

Setting the Stage: Jewish Identity in the Nineteenth Century and the Impact of the Dreyfus Affair

2007 ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Nadia Malinovich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

This chapter provides a background on Jewish social and cultural history in the nineteenth century and describes the complex impact of the Dreyfus affair on French Jewry. It looks at the first generations of post-revolutionary Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders that had been primarily concerned with promoting Jewish integration and acculturation. It also recounts how the emergence of ethnic nationalism and the modern antisemitic movement forced French Jews to negotiate between a commitment to universalist Enlightenment principles and the racialized discourses of identity. The chapter investigates the explosion of the Dreyfus affair that openly questioned Franco-Judaism and confronted the complexity of Jewish identity in the modern world head-on. It looks at the antisemitism in France, the affair prompted more sympathetic attitude towards Jews in French leftist circles.

Introduction: The Ottoman Empire and its Frontiers

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. S. PEACOCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

Stretching across Europe, Asia and Africa for half a millennium bridging the end of the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was one of the major forces that forged the modern world. The chapters in this book focus on four key themes: frontier fortifications, the administration of the frontier, frontier society and relations between rulers and ruled, and the economy of the frontier. Through snapshots of aspects of Ottoman frontier policies in such diverse times and places as fifteenth-century Anatolia, seventeenth-century Hungary, nineteenth-century Iraq or twentieth-century Jordan, the book provides a richer picture than hitherto available of how this complex empire coped with the challenge of administering and defending disparate territories in an age of comparatively primitive communications. By way of introduction, this chapter seeks to provide an overview of these four themes in the history of Ottoman frontiers.

HARMONIZATION OF PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH AS A GUARANTEE OF QUALITY OF HUMAN LIFE

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 138-142
Author(s):  
A. G. Suprun ◽  
◽  
S. S Salnik ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
World View ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Spiritual Health ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Physical Status

Life of everybody is unique and unique. Questions about essence and origin of life always influenced on forming of world view of humanity. Intercommunication between a man and biosphere is actual at all times. Bioethics is based on principle of respect to life each. An autonomy of psychical and physical status of personality is one of her substantive provisions. It is set that a man that knows the limits of the health rationally keeps and strengthens him. The phenomenon of health is examined as the state, phenomenon and process of forming, maintenance, strengthening, renewal and transmission physical, psychical, social and spiritual constituents of man. The transmitters of health are separate people, groups of people and society on the whole. A primary purpose is illumination of problem of harmonization of physical and spiritual health in the modern world. A health of man is not only individual but also social value that needs maintenance and guard. On quality of health of modern man such factors influence as: society, heredity, contamination of environment, not mobile way of life, unbalanced feed, psycho-emotional loading, pernicious habits.

Myth and legend as functional instruments in politics: the establishment of the ʿAlawī Dynasty in Morocco

1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. A. Mojuetan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
National Myth

The paper examines the ‘Ibn Mashʿal episode’ in Moroccan history and explodes its myth. The episode was a non-event; there was no Jew involved, let alone his assassination. The story was false propaganda by al-Rashīd designed for rallying popular support behind his newly-established power. Its acceptance was assisted by the prevalent world-view. Two anonymous Englishmen visiting Morocco in the seventeenth century were the first to commit to writing the ‘national myth’, thus giving it its first seal of authority, which was later reinforced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Moroccan chroniclers. The mock commemoration of this non-event, by serving as a regular reminder of the redeeming role of the ‘Alawī dynasty, helped to arouse and promote continuing loyalty to the throne. Various distortions have, however, crept into the basic substratum of al-Rashīd's mythical presentation.

scholarly journals Jesuit Catechisms for Soldiers (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries): Changes and Continuities

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-623
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Lavenia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Military Chaplains ◽  
The Great War

This paper proposes a literary journey through the manuals for soldiers written by Jesuits prior to the twentieth century. After briefly outlining the debut of these publications, at the hands of Antonio Possevino and of Thomas Sailly, who led the first permanent mission of military chaplains in Flanders, it will focus on three moments: the second half of the seventeenth century, when the wars of religion wound down and we find the first manuals where, alongside the desire to impose discipline on armies, a patriotic rhetoric begins to be heard; the middle years of the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution, when, after the establishment of barracks and permanent chaplaincies, even texts aimed at the Christian soldier transposed the vocabulary of the Droit des gens in; finally, the nineteenth century, when the Society was restored and undertook the religious conversion of the soldiery against the perils of the modern world. In Belgium, the birth of a liberal Catholic regime supported a patriotically-toned missionary effort from Jesuit chaplains. Later, the mystique of the nation would affect the majority of texts aimed at combatants and their chaplains during the Great War.

Gog and Magog On Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps: Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gow
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World View ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Graphic Form ◽  
Marginal Areas ◽  
Marco Polo ◽  
The World ◽  
Rules Of Evidence ◽  
Rapid Transformation

AbstractGog and Magog, the apocalyptic destroyers prophesied in the book of Revelations, gave concrete expression to the apocalyptic climate that dominated medieval thinking about the future-and the present. They permeated medieval texts and appeared in most maps of the world. Historians are coming to understand medieval and early modern world maps not primarily as rather primitive technical tools but as cultural documents. Such maps expressed in graphic form the world view(s) of medieval elites (princely, scholarly, mercantile). The traditional contents of mappaemundi and early printed maps place them firmly in the tradition of medieval learning, yet they show signs very early on of skeptical and "empirical" questioning directed at received (mainly ancient) wisdom concerning the existence, location, population, and qualities of traditional cartographic *topoi (e.g., the kingdom of Prester John). As Renaissance source-scholarship, rules of evidence, and overseas exploration reshaped cartography, world maps underwent both a rapid transformation into sources of up-to-date information and a certain retrenchment of traditional contents, especially in distant and marginal areas. Gog and Magog are among the principal remnants of the medieval dream of the world. They appear, often with reference to Marco Polo, on world maps well into the seventeenth century. Early modern Europeans continued to view much of the world through medieval lenses.

Flights of Archival Imagination: Woolf’s Transcendent Materiality in Contemporary “Archive Fiction”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Inverse Relationship ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Historical Texts

For Virginia Woolf, the seemingly contradicting elements of material narrowness and imaginative expanse were crucial components for historical writing. In “The Lives of the Obscure” there is a certain irony in the writer’s desire to “romantically […] feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost” who resides in one of the bland “nameless tombstones Nos. 1763, 1080, and 606”. Yet it is this inverse relationship between banal materiality and imaginative flight that fires not only Woolf’s history writing but also the meta-historical fiction that continues to flourishes in her wake. I argue that Woolf has had a profound, if not critical, impact on what has been recently termed “archive fiction”. In this paper, I consider two recent examples that use material heritage as a means to step outside the bounds of the possible, Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) and Hermione Eyre’s Viper Wine (2014). Gee’s text creates a physically realised instance of the archival imagination whereby interaction with Woolf’s relics bring a version of the author back to life as a comment on contemporary desires to resurrect the “stranded ghosts” of history for present-day self-fulfilment. Eyre uses many of Woolf’s methods of archival interaction in a study of seventeenth century nobility whose material traces are the means of sparking a fantasy of fluid temporality. Archival material in fiction thus acts as Woolf’s “fertile fact, the fact that suggests and engenders”, by transcending its apparently prosaic limitations to “re-create” lives, both obscure and famous. In these meta-historical texts, confronting the uncertain affectivity that inevitably enters into interactions with tangible heritage is a means of understanding the intangible relationship the contemporary reader has with cultural history.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document