scholarly journals The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hogg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
The Devil

‘We have heard much of the rage of fanaticism in former days, but nothing to this.’ A wretched young man, ‘an outcast in the world’, tells the story of his upbringing by a heretical Calvinist minister who leads him to believe that he is one of the elect, predestined for salvation and thus above the moral law. Falling under the spell of a mysterious stranger who bears an uncanny likeness to himself, he embarks on a career as a serial murderer. Robert Wringhim's Memoirs are presented by an editor whose attempts to explain the story only succeed in intensifying its more baffling and bizarre aspects. Is Wringhim the victim of a psychotic delusion, or has he been tempted by the devil to wage war against God's enemies? Hogg's sardonic and terrifying novel, too perverse for nineteenth-century taste, is now recognized as one of the masterpieces of Romantic fiction. The first edition text of 1824 has been freshly considered for this new edition. A critical introduction explores the remarkable career of the novel's author and its historical, theological, and cultural contexts.

scholarly journals Blavatsky the Satanist: Luciferianism in Theosophy, and its Feminist Implications

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Faxneld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Instrumental Value ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 3 ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Cultural Hero

H. P. Blavatsky’s influential The Secret Doctrine (1888), one of the foundation texts of Theosophy, contains chapters propagating an unembarrassed Satanism. Theosophical sympathy for the Devil also extended to the name of their journal Lucifer, and discussions conducted in it. To Blavatsky, Satan is a cultural hero akin to Pro- metheus. According to her reinterpretation of the Christian myth of the Fall in Genesis 3, Satan in the shape of the serpent brings gnosis and liberates mankind. The present article situates these ideas in a wider nineteenth-century context, where some poets and socialist thinkers held similar ideas and a counter-hegemonic reading of the Fall had far-reaching feminist implications. Additionally, influences on Blavatsky from French occultism and research on Gnosticism are discussed, and the instrumental value of Satanist shock tactics is con- sidered. The article concludes that esoteric ideas cannot be viewed in isolation from politics and the world at large. Rather, they should be analyzed both as part of a religious cosmology and as having strategic polemical and didactic functions related to political debates, or, at the very least, carrying potential entailments for the latter.Keywords: Theosophy, Blavatsky, Satanism, Feminism, Socialism, Romanticism.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

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.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

Rethinking Mahler

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Past

Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.

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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