Making Milton’s Bogey

Making Milton ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Lara Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The Relationship

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Gilbert and Gubar posit Milton and Paradise Lost as a ‘bogey’ for women writers. Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (1987) suggests an alternative reception history in which Milton’s poetry provided the basis for a more inclusive literary canon. This chapter re-examines the question of the relationship between Milton’s poetry, primarily Paradise Lost, and women’s literary history through a case study of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720). Though Finch acknowledges Milton’s influence explicitly in her blank-verse pastoral ‘Fanscomb Barn’, implicit debts are present throughout Finch’s 1713 Miscellany Poems and the fair-copy manuscript compilation ‘Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia’ (1691–1701). The very different status of Milton and his verse in these two contexts illustrates the conflicted legacy of Paradise Lost for women’s literary history.

scholarly journals “Catastrophically Romantic”: Radical Inversions of Gilbert and Gubar’s Monstrous Angel in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-110
Author(s):  
Ashley E. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Female Violence ◽  
Female Figures

Abstract In their landmark text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteen Century Literary Imagination (1970), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pose a series of hypotheses concerning women-authored fiction in the nineteenth century, identifying two archetypical female figures in patriarchal literary contexts – the Angel in the House, and the Monstrous (Mad)Woman. Gilbert and Gubar echo a Woolf-ian call to action that women writers must destroy both the angel and the monster in their fiction, and many contemporary women authors have answered that call – examining and complicating Gilbert and Gubar’s original dichotomy to reflect contemporary concerns with female violence and feminism. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and in particular the character of Amy Elliott Dunne, explores modern iterations of the Angel v. Monster dynamic in the guise of the “Cool Girl,” thus revising these stereotypes to fit them in a postmodern socio-historical context. The controversy that surrounds the text, as well as its incredible popularity, indicates that the narrative has struck a chord with readers and critics alike. Both Amy and Nick Dunne represent the Angel and the Monster in their marriage, embodying Flynn’s critical feminist commentary on white, upper-middle class, heterosexual psychopathy.

The Science of Destruction

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Werrett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Explosive Chemicals

This chapter surveys the evolution of chemical and mechanical weapons used by terrorists between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, ranging from the diabolical contraptions of “infernal machines” to dynamite, the terrorist’s favorite explosive, invented by Alfred Nobel in the 1860s. The chapter also explores the ingenuity of terror. While anarchists and revolutionaries who used explosive chemicals are often represented as merely consumers of the latest scientific creations, the chapter argues that in fact these communities showed considerable ingenuity in devising new weapons. A brief case study of the career of Irish nationalist Robert Emmet’s rockets in the pre-dynamite era demonstrates this. The chapter concludes by considering the relationship of terror and science, and contrasts the radical political views of terrorists with their typically unchallenging acceptance of scientific authority and opinions in the nineteenth century.

Economics, Race, and the Postwar US Novel: A Quantitative Literary History

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sinykin ◽  
Richard Jean So ◽  
Jessica Young
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
White Men ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract How has the language of economics, as codified by economics as a discipline, entered the US novel in the postwar period? Have economists influenced novelists at the level of language, and if so, how and how much? We begin with the belief, inferred from current scholarship on economics and culture, but never before empirically tested, that economic language became more prevalent around 1980, especially among white men—a belief that we strive to complicate and give nuance. Readers may detect an irony in the relationship between our method and case study. No academic discipline has valorized the use of quantification for social analysis more than economics. As a discipline, its language has become saturated with the language of modeling. Cultural and literary critics have long argued that economics has even harmed society by creating false accounts of how humans behave and think. Can we take their tools, however, and make them ours as a way to critique economics itself?

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

scholarly journals J.C.Sturm: Before the Silence: An Exploration of Her Early Writing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Margaret Michael
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Main Tendency ◽  
Second World

<p>This thesis considers the early works of J. C. Sturm, her own thesis, her short stories, articles and book reviews written in the 1950s before her writing and publishing silence. It examines where this writing places her in context of the post-Second World War period and where it could have placed her in the New Zealand literary canon had it not been for her ensuing literary silence.  The first chapter briefly discusses the nature of literary silences and then introduces Sturm with some biographical information. It details the approach that I take writing the thesis using three readings of her works: as social informer; as woman writer; and as Maori writer. These readings inform my commentary on her work and attempt to place her in the literary canon of the fifties. I discuss my reservations, as a Pakeha, in approaching Sturm as a Maori writer.  I use Sturm’s own comments “that many literary works can be taken as social documents and many authors can be taken as social informers” as a licence to use Sturm herself as “social informer”. It can be demonstrated how the ideas she promulgates in her thesis, New Zealand Character as Exemplified in Three New Zealand Novelists are developed in her short stories, articles and book reviews and in how Sturm holds her mirror up to New Zealand society.  Reading Sturm as a "woman” writer demonstrates how, through her short stories, she destroyed the “idyll of suburban domesticity”. Terry Sturm wrote of women’s writing of the 1970s that “its main tendency is to challenge male accounts of New Zealand society and culture”. Twenty years before this date I show that J. C. Sturm was writing that woman’s account and challenging the male expectations of a woman’s place in the home and society.  Using Sturm’s description that being a Maori writer is “a way of feeling”, her short stories and articles published in Te Ao Hou enable a discussion of Maori writing in the fifties, exploring both the writing context and the critical environment in which this writing was received. The hindsight provided by this exploration some fifty to sixty years on demonstrates the forgetting and misremembering that can happen in a literary context and the effect that forgetting can have on a Maori literary history.  In the final section I reconstruct the somewhat artificially deconstructed strands that have made up the previous chapters, bringing Sturm’s works together as a whole to enable a discussion on Sturm’s rightful place in the New Zealand’s literary canon of the fifties, as well as exploring further the natures of Sturm’s silence in order to bring some remembering into the long forgetting of Sturm’s early work.</p>

“Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction”: Constructing the True Catholic Woman in the Ave Maria, 1865-1889

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penny Edgell Becker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Systematic Examination ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Official Ideology ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship between gender ideology and popular culture in one particular time and place—a Catholic family magazine called the Ave Maria during the latter part of the nineteenth Century. This case study yields an interpretive sociological account of how women were portrayed in this magazine, an account that sheds light on our understanding of the construction and negotiation of religious ideologies. When I speak of “ideology,” I refer to highly articulated and explicit meaning Systems that construct and regulate patterns of conduct. “Official ideologies” are endorsed and promoted by organizational officials and/or community elites.A systematic examination of Ave Maria from 1865 to 1889 reveals that two-thirds of the articles reproduce some version of the official ideology of the True Catholic Woman. On the other hand, about one-third of the articles produce what I call “alternative interpretations”—“alternative” because they are critical of the limits that the official versions placed on women's character, activity, or autonomy.

Associating Physics and Chemistry to Dissociate Molecules

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Petit
Keyword(s):  
Physical Chemistry ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Limited Communication ◽  
Ionic Dissociation ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Svante Arrhenius ◽  
The Relationship

A case study of the Clausius-Williamson hypothesis sheds light on the development of the physical sciences during the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, Rudolf Clausius and Alexander William Williamson independently developed similar hypotheses at a time when physics and chemistry were beginning to be considered independent endeavors. Some thirty years later, after specialization took root, their names were associated; the two hypotheses became the hypothesis of Clausius-Williamson. How and why were these distinct investigations conducted in the 1850s unified in the 1880s? The current historiography addresses the Clausius-Williamson hypothesis as it is featured in subsequent interpretations by Svante Arrhenius, but does not thoroughly analyze the published writings of Clausius and Williamson themselves. This paper reappraises Clausius’s and Williamson’s works in their original context and analyzes how their hypotheses came to be associated. This case study emphasizes how the relationship between physics and chemistry evolved in the nineteenth century. More specifically, it underscores the limited communication between these disciplines in the 1850s and the rise of interdisciplinarity in the 1880s, which led to the creation of a new field: physical chemistry. From the study of the emergence and success of the theory of ionic dissociation and physical chemistry, I show that referring to the authoritative figures of Clausius and Williamson legitimized and valorized investigations at the borderlands of physics and chemistry in a context of increased specialization.

“Rotten Effeminate Stuff”: Patriarchy, Domesticity, and Home in Victorian and Edwardian English Public Schools

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108
Author(s):  
Jane Hamlett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
British History ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Home And School ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractDuring the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Approaches to date have emphasized the schools’ roles in distancing boys from the world of the home, domesticity, femininity, and women. Focusing on three case-study schools, Winchester College, Charterhouse, and Lancing College, this article offers a reassessment of the relationship between home and school in the Victorian and Edwardian period and contributes to the growing literature on forms of masculine domesticity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the reformed public schools, the ideal of the patriarchal household was often essential, and in producing it, the presence of significant women—the wives of headmasters and housemasters—could be vital. The schools also worked to create a specifically masculine form of domesticity through boys’ performance of mundane domestic tasks in the “fagging” system, which was often imagined in terms of the chivalric service ideal. Letters from the period show how the everyday worlds of school and home remained enmeshed, revealing the distinctive nature of family relationships forged by the routine of presence and absence that public schools created.

scholarly journals Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-279
Author(s):  
Ryan Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Television Broadcasting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Network Channel ◽  
Paralympic Games ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis concluding chapter uses British free-to-air television broadcasting network Channel 4’s “Superhumans Return” advertising campaign for its coverage of the 2016 Paralympic Games as a case study with which to explore the overlaps between nineteenth-century and contemporary cultural representations of prosthesis users. It highlights the way that contemporary sources, including Channel 4’s campaign, interrogate a privileging of normalcy while remaining encoded by ableist inclinations. The chapter draws together the various strands of the book’s argument to make the case that the literary history of prosthesis is rich, complicated, and conflicted.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-55
Author(s):  
Nick Hubble
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Proletarian Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction defines and contextualises what William Empson called ‘the popular, vague, but somehow obvious, idea of proletarian literature’. After discussing various theories of proletarian literature, including Empson’s conception of it as a version of pastoral, it is analysed in terms of a complex intersectional relationship between gender and class and illustrated by a case study of Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned. The second half of the introduction begins with a detailed reception history of proletarian literature before going on to discuss the relationship between proletarian literature and modernism. The final section lays out the argument of the book and argues that the key orientation of proletarian modernist writing is to the future rather than the past.

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