Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harriet Archer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
National History ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Textual History ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Models Of Reading

The introduction reflects on standard early modern prefatory statements of textual imperfection as a productive way into the narrative of the Mirror for Magistrates’ sixty-year evolution. Portrayed in successive editions as unfinished and open to expansion and revision, the Mirror compromises the stability of national history and text itself in the course of its metaliterary commentary on its own textual history. The introduction sketches the Mirror’s chequered reception in modern scholarship, from mid-twentieth-century scepticism to its recent critical revival, and gestures towards its pervasive presence in late Elizabethan literary culture as evidence of the centrality of its models of reading and writing history for Spenser, Shakespeare, and others. An outline of the subsequent chapters concludes this section.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

Hutton as an Author

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Industrial Town

Reading and writing were cornerstones of the lives of self-educated rough diamonds like Hutton. He is a perfect example of the dreaded rising author, who wrote for money, without education or status. His writings reveal new modes of authorship and the literary culture of an industrial town. Chapter 6 appraises his work by examining 70 periodical reviews of Hutton’s 15 books. Based on personal experience, they mixed history, travelogues, and life writing. Though they suited the nation’s thirst for entertainment and useful knowledge, Hutton has not been recognized as a new kind of writer, who produced unlearned books for a commercial age. His blunt style and breach of polite norms horrified the literary establishment. But his accessible prose satisfied new audiences and led to alternative yardsticks of literary taste. Hutton thus had an impact on two contrasting groups of readers, and helped put the English Midlands on the national literary map.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

scholarly journals England and the Catholic Reformation: The Peripheries Strike Back

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-285
Author(s):  
James E. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Position Paper ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Early Modern English

AbstractAlthough the Protestant Reformation has traditionally been the focus of research on early modern England, the last two decades have witnessed a rapid increase in scholarship on the experience of the country’s Catholics. Questions surrounding the implementation of the Catholic Reformation in England have been central since the topic’s inception as a subject of academic interest, and the field has more recently captured the attention of, amongst others, literary scholars, musicologists and those working on visual and material culture. This article is a position paper that argues early modern English Catholicism, though not doing away with all continuities from before the country’s definitive break with Rome, was fully engaged with the global Catholic Reformation, both being influenced by it, but also impacting its progression. Whether through reading and writing, or more physical expressions of mission and reform, English Catholicism was a vital part of the wider Catholic Reformation.

EEN POPULAIRE ARISTOCRAAT

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-169
Author(s):  
Erica van Boven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
General Public ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Cultural Hierarchy ◽  
Intellectual Elite

A POPULAR ARISTOCRAT. ARTHUR VAN SCHENDEL AND THE READING PUBLIC IN THE 1930S In Dutch literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual elite and general public were not only separate, but even opposite categories. ‘Highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ held polarized positions in matters of cultural hierarchy and literary taste, which led to fierce debates. Strikingly, one author was able to bridge this gap: Arthur van Schendel (1874-1946) appealed both ends of the spectrum and thus had an exceptional, connecting role in the cultural divides of the interwar period. This article analyses the responses to Van Schendels so-called ‘Dutch novels’ in order to find out what made Arthur van Schendel highly valued by leading professionals as well as loved by the reading audience.

“Advanced Marriage Technique”: Sex as a Perfectible Skill in Mid-twentieth-century American Marriage Manuals

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 460-482
Author(s):  
Matthew Lavine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Marriage And Family ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Advice Literature ◽  
The Stability

While earlier marital advice literature treated sexual intercourse as a matter of conditioned instinct, marriage manuals in the mid-twentieth century portrayed it as a skill, and one that was rarely cultivated adequately. The didactic, quantified, objectively examined and rule-bound approach to sex promulgated by these manuals parallels other ways in which Americans subjected their personal and intimate lives to the tutelage of experts. Anxieties about the stability of marriage and family life were both heightened and salved by the authoritative tone of scientific authority used in these books.

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