Concluding Note

2020 ◽  
pp. 309-320
Author(s):  
Maroona Murmu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Ideals

The conclusion focuses upon reception-based approach to understand the significance of women authors in the social map of reading community in nineteenth-century Bengal. It demonstrates how, even after the emergence of a sizeable reading community catering to books authored by women, due to the spatial ‘respectability’ of the presses from which their books got published the reception of prohibited penmanship by women by the bhadralok society in ‘renascent’ Bengal was disappointing. Since some women flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, the bhadralok critics, in their reviews of book by women, often censured the authors if their autonomous selfhood in print became threatening and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. However, such sarcastic comments and caustic critique could not strip women authors of their creative foray in the literary world. By the turn of the century, they had begun creating a literary tradition of their own in Bengali.

Words of Her Own

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maroona Murmu
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Language Form ◽  
Feminine Voice ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Feminine Ideals ◽  
Writing Community ◽  
Language Content

Drawing on a spectrum of genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels and travelogues, this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the emergence of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors as an ever-growing distinct category in nineteenth-century Bengal and the factors facilitating production and circulation of their creations. By exploring the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, religion, and culture in women-authored texts and by reading these within a specific milieu, the study opens up the possibility of re-configuring mainstream history-writing that often ignores women. Questioning essentialist conceptions of women’s writings, it contends that there exists no monolithic body of ‘women’s writings’ with a firmly gendered language, form, style, and content. It shows that there was nothing in the women’s writings that was based on a fundamentally feminine perspective of experiences with an inherent feminine voice. While describing the specifically female life world of domestic experiences, women authors might have made conscious divergences from male-projected stereotypes, but it is equally true that there are a number of issues on which men and women authors spoke in unison. The book argues for distinctions within each genre and across genres in language, content, and style amongst women authors. Even after women authors emerged as a writing community, the bhadralok critics often censured them for fear of their autonomous selfhood in print and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. Nevertheless, there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, thus creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.

Infidel Deathbeds: Irreligious Dying and Sincere Disbelief in Nineteenth-Century America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Kime
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Society

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.

Attitudes and Responses to Vagrancy in Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Crossman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Criminal Offence ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Special Category

This essay focuses on a special category of Irish crime: vagrancy. While vagrancy was a criminal offence in its own right, it was often its association with other forms of criminality and immorality that ensured ‘tramps’ could be viewed with fear and contempt in the Irish countryside. The relationship between crime and poverty has been a subject of considerable debate in numerous scholarly fields. This essay makes the important point that tramps were viewed with suspicion, not on account of their poverty intrinsically, but rather because they consciously rejected social norms in favour of an itinerant lifestyle. The ‘tramp problem’ occupied the attentions of the public and the administrators alike at the turn of the century: the former sometimes startled by the arrival at their door of a ‘big lazy fellow’ demanding relief, and the latter busily issuing circulars to magistrates and police imploring them to clamp down on the offenders. In the end, however, an unsatisfactory justice system predicated on punishment merely reinforced existing prejudices and did little to alleviate the social inequality that gave rise to vagrancy in the first place.

Underdevelopment and Class Formation in Ovamboland, 1845–1915

1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. G. Clarence-Smith ◽  
R. Moorsom
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Flood Plain ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ivory Trade

The Ovambo and their Nkhumbi neighbours live in a flood plain, which is artificially divided by the present frontier between Angola and Namibia. From the mid-nineteenth century until World War I, they underwent a process of underdevelopment and class formation linked to the evolution of commercial relations with western societies. Between 1845 and 1885 the ivory trade temporarily enriched the Ovambo and widened the productive base of their economy through the introduction of fire-arms. At the same time, however, fire-arms became a necessity, and thus forged permanent links of dependence on western societies. Cattle replaced ivory as an export item after the elephants had been shot out, but pressure on the Ovambo's own cattle resources were largely avoided by systematic raiding in southern Angola. After the turn of the century natural disasters and effective Portuguese resistance to raiding made this solution inoperative, and led to a general impoverishment of Ovambo society. The social impact of this impoverishment was extremely uneven, for the kings and their followers passed it on to the more vulnerable members of society through a system of harsh and arbitrary taxation. A new stratum of men without cattle was thus forced to turn to migrant labour in Namibia and Angola. The colonial conquest of 1915 froze this situation into a permanent system of recurrent labour migration.

On "Secondary Aesthetics, Without Isolation": Philosophical Origins of Mikhail Bakhtin's Theory of Form

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Dušan Radunović
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Judgment ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Empirical Reality ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Intellectual Movements

This paper discusses the philosophical origins as well as the social context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of aesthetic form. Bakhtin’s critique of the Russian Formalist conception of form, which reaches its most elaborate form in his 1924 article “The Methodological Questions of Literary Aesthetics” (“K voprosam metodologii estetiki slovesnogo tvorchestva”), is methodologically rooted in various strands of neo-Kantian philosophy and aesthetics, most notably, in the works of Hermann Cohen and Broder Christiansen. It was from the neo-Kantian philosophical repertoire that Bakhtin derived his foundational argument that aesthetic activity represents a “secondary creation.” Art, according to Bakhtin, stands in contrast to the “primary creative acts” of cognition and ethical judgment, hence it encounters a “reality” that had already been articulated and ordered by cognitive and moral acts. In keeping with this principle, Bakhtin postulates that the aesthetic act is the reassessment of, rather than a direct intervention into, empirical reality. In this constellation, artistic form is seen as the quintessential achievement of aesthetic activity that incorporates, but is categorically irreducible to, cognitively and ethically inarticulate material. Having traced the philosophical origins of Bakhtin’s meditation on form in turn-of-the-century German neo-Kantianism, the paper finally aims to appraise Bakhtin’s inquiry into aesthetic form, especially his emphatic rebuttal of the Russian Formalist assertion of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, against the background of more general trends in the humanities, both European and Russian, toward the separation and specialization of disciplines. Bakhtin’s neo-Kantian unitary vision of arts and humanities, the paper concludes, was fundamentally in conflict with the modernizing tendency in arts and humanities, the offshoots of which he recognized, and thus fervently denied, in a number of contemporaneous artistic and intellectual movements and practices.

Who Was Who? Race and Jews in Turn-of-the-Century Britain

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 460-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Determinant ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
East End ◽  
Biological Race

Race—as a category—has commonly been understood as a response to difference. In the first instance, race offered a means of ordering unfamiliar peoples, whether encountered in the empire or at home. In the European historiography, the notion of “biological” race, defined by an inherited set of characteristics passed through the blood, possesses a particular genealogy: its roots can be found in the eighteenth century, its fullest articulation came in the late nineteenth century, and its twentieth-century decline was hastened by the Holocaust.This article sets out a different, if not completely incompatible, thesis. It takes the case of British Jews to argue that racial categories could arise as a response to the apparent similarities, as well as the perceived differences, between Jews and other Britons. Put differently, in the late nineteenth century, Jews came increasingly to be identified as a race precisely because they were difficult to differentiate from their fellow citizens. Class proved a critical determinant. Jews became ever more invisible as they scaled the social ladder. “East End” Jews—poor and newly immigrated—might be readily detectable, but their middle- and upper-middle-class “West End” counterparts confounded observers. Notions of race, I will argue, emerged in part as a consequence of assimilation, delimiting difference in a nation where formal legal barriers to Jewish integration had been eliminated and social obstacles largely overcome.Race was a staple term of the late nineteenth century. It proliferated throughout the language of the time.

Liszt at the Piano: The Impact of Iconography on mid-Nineteenth Century Musicology

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Impact

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

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