The Constant Roots of English Song

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Battle Of Brunanburh

This chapter documents a wide variety of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon poems, real, mediated, and imaginary, that both contributed and conformed to a pattern of understanding that insisted on English literary culture as essential and unchanging. The chapter begins with more examples of ‘Saxon’ poems from Scott’s Ivanhoe, examples which more conventionally typify the early nineteenth-century construction of Anglo-Saxon than Ulrica’s Hymn. The editorial and translational choices made by John and William Conybeare in Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry receive close scrutiny, and the invention of the ‘Anglo-Saxon ballad’ is charted across the course of the chapter. Milton is argued to have been a de facto Anglo-Saxonist poet to the Victorians, and close readings of Anglo-Saxon poems by Wordsworth and Longfellow are pursued, with an allusion to The Battle of Brunanburh being advanced for Wordsworth’s sonnet on the ‘Saxon Conquest’.

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Material Conditions

This study explores the crystallising of a colonial literary culture in early nineteenth-century British India, and its development over the course of the Victorian period. It focuses on a wide range of texts, including works of historiography, travel writing, correspondence, fiction, and poetry, produced by amateur writers as well as writers who were better known and more professionalised. Its aim is to delineate the parameters and operations of a literary culture that is both local, in that it responds to the material conditions and experiences specific to colonial British India, and transnational, in that it evolves from and in reaction to the metropolitan culture of Britain. The writers I discuss were British, and lived and worked in British India (anglophone writing by Indians falls outside the parameters of this study). They often published their work for limited circulation within the colonial marketplace, but also with an eye to the more extensive readership of ‘home’. While individual authors’ works may be inconsequential or ephemeral, and sometimes apparently derivative of metropolitan texts and genres, the corpus in total constitutes a significant body of literature with its own concerns, themes and formats....

scholarly journals Unpacking Viazemskii's Khalat: The Technologies of Dilettantism in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Culture

Slavic Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Bowers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Information Transfer ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Central Image ◽  
Informal Approach ◽  
The Way

This article explores the image of the khalat, or dressing gown, in and around Petr Viazemskii's 1817 poem “Proshchanie s khalatom” (Farewell to My Dressing Gown). As the poem circulated during the period between its creation and printing, its central image—the khalat—became enshrined as a symbol for early nineteenth-century literary culture around and within the Arzamas circle, emphasizing a creative inner life and an informal approach to writing. The poem mediates between friendship, honor, authenticity, and authorship and the formalities, duties, and expectations of society life. The khalat image appears in later poems, correspondence, and occasional writings by Anton Del'vig, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Vasilii Zhukovskii, among others. Tracing the image through its intertextual influences, extratextual impact, and memetic evolution, I examine the way it contributed to the development of an intellectual network through information transfer during the early nineteenth century and beyond.

‘Barbarous Hymn’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early English ◽  
Current Popularity

This chapter begins by contrasting the current popularity of Beowulf with its relative obscurity at the start of the nineteenth century. It suggests that the most well-known ‘Anglo-Saxon’ poem during the nineteenth century was ‘Ulrica’s hymn’ from Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. The chapter details how this poem was both shaped by, and shaped, nineteenth-century antiquarian writing on Anglo-Saxon poetry, drawing on many works held in Scott’s library at Abbotsford. Scott’s ‘Saxon’ poem is seen as a product of Romantic Primitivism, and an idealized staging, or performance of early English literature. Ulrica’s ‘Hymn’ stands both as an origin for contemporary English literary culture, and also as a problem that the novel must erase. As such it provides an apt introductory emblem for nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon poetry.

‘From scarped cliff and quarried stone a thousand types gone’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Common Opinion ◽  
The Common ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
Battle Of Brunanburh ◽  
First Time

Tennyson’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is reassessed in order to disprove the common opinion that he had only rudimentary knowledge of the language, and relied mainly on his son’s prose translation of The Battle of Brunanburh in order to make a poetic version of that text. Detailed examination of manuscript evidence proves that Tennyson applied himself to serious and sustained study of Anglo-Saxon, and this chapter identifies for the first time texts, including dictionaries, that he used to teach himself Anglo-Saxon. It is argued that Tennyson’s poetry exhibits traits of both phases of nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism that Fossil Poetry identifies. The chapter closes by reading the Anglo-Saxonist etymological layer of several poems by Tennyson, including In Memoriam.

A history of some fruit models in wax and other materials: scientific teaching aids and courtly table decorations

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teaching Aids ◽  
Scientific Teaching ◽  
Glass Marble ◽  
History Of ◽  
By Products ◽  
Wax Models

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

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