The Roman Aura in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carlos Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Classical Culture

Concentrating on Henry James’s Daisy Miller, this chapter reveals its author engaging in arguments over the decline and fall of the Roman Empire among nineteenth-century Anglo-American writers and over the best means of using Rome’s example as a warning to contemporaries. The novella’s Roman setting and frequent references to classical culture both extend Anglo-American Romantics’ emphasis on the Roman failure to develop a comprehensive democracy and allow James to pursue his own interest in post-Civil War America as an emerging global power. Departing from earlier interpretations of Rome’s importance within Daisy Miller, this chapter argues that James employs the character of Daisy to reconceive Rome’s relevance to central issues of class and gender. If James rejects aspects of contemporary American feminism embodied by such classically inspired artists as Harriet Hosmer and Maria Louisa Lander, he nevertheless makes his unsophisticated heroine, Daisy, into a means of expressing his democratic vision.

The Civil War and U.S. World Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Sexton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
World Power ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.

Marriage on the Border

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Conflicting Messages ◽  
The Way

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the mid-nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. There, the clashing ideologies of this era—slavery and freedom, urban and rural, industrial and agrarian—met, merged, and melded. As they did, they formed something new—a fluid, flexible identity that somehow grew from these tensions while rising above them. This border identity would play a critical role in these states’ experiences during the secession crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, this story—one of political division, internal warfare, and economic struggles—is only one part of the border South’s larger saga. Focusing on the heart of this complicated region, Marriage on the Border reveals how this border environment shaped the lives and loves of Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Appalachian Virginians. Inundated with conflicting messages about marriage, divorce, and gender, these border southerners set their own path. In an era when advice manuals urged all Americans to adopt new ideals of companionate marriage and loving mutuality, border southerners proved especially receptive to these notions. Additionally, when these marriages crumbled, border southerners found ways to divorce more easily than other southerners of this era. Marriage on the Border follows border southerners through their courtships and into their homes, through blissful marriages and turbulent divorce dramas, through secession, war, and reconstruction. Along the way, Marriage on the Border captures the turmoil and confusion of this era, not in its legislative halls or on the battlefield, but in the households of those who lived at the heart of the country.

Alcott and Tocqueville: Toward a Textual Conjugation

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-229
Author(s):  
John Dolis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Society ◽  
Societal Expectations

In 1835, Alexis de Tocquevdle (1805-1859) published Volume One of his Democracy in America in France; Volume Two followed in 1840. Translated into English, the work received critical acclaim in the States, and substantial passages were printed in American schoolbooks of the period. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) published Tittle Women, a sentimental novel exploring feminist dimensions of both subject and citizen identity in light of family relationships and gender roles as each of the four March daughters— Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—strives, in her own way, to meet parental and societal expectations regarding the duties of mothers, sisters, wives, and citizens. The récit centers around Jo (Josephine) March, a bold, frank, and passionate tomboy, whose ardor for writing situates her at troublesome odds with the constraints that nineteenth-century American society placed on women. Excluded from fighting as a soldier (during the Civil War) and attending college, Jo tenaciously rebels against familial and societal pressures to find a suitable husband and settle down.

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Daggett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Language Barrier ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The City

The advent of Modern American Spiritualism took place in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. This book focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey, a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans historiography owning, in part, to a language barrier. The book weaves an intriguing historical tale of the supernatural, chaotic postbellum politics, and the personal triumphs and tragedies of Henry Louis Rey. Besides Rey’s séance circle, there is also a discussion about the Anglo-American séance circles in New Orleans. The book places these séance circles within the context of the national scene, and the genesis of nineteenth-century Spiritualism is examined with a special emphasis placed on events in New York and Boston. The lifetime of Henry Rey and that of his father, Barthélemy Rey, spanned the nineteenth century, and mirror the social and political dilemmas of the black Creoles. The book concludes with a comparison of Spiritualism with the Spiritualist and Spiritual churches, as well as voodoo. The book’s narrative is accompanied by wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs.

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

The Blue Flower and the Account Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Anne F. Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
Racial Category ◽  
North American West ◽  
Mixed Blood ◽  
Anglo American

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

The Identification and Study of Indian Shell Middens in Eastern North America: 1643–1861

1986 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew L. Christenson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Eastern North America ◽  
Shell Midden ◽  
Shell Middens ◽  
Work Done

Although the interest in shell middens in North America is often traced to reports of the discoveries in Danish kjoekkenmoeddings in the mid-nineteenth century, extensive shell midden studies were already occurring on the East Coast by that time. This article reviews selected examples of this early work done by geologists and naturalists, which served as a foundation for shell midden studies by archaeologists after the Civil War.

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