Republican Romans

Author(s):  
Shushma Malik

This article considers how the Roman Republic could function as a site of decadence for both ancient writers and later critics. While Imperial Rome and its colorful emperors frequently appear in fin-de-siècle literature and artwork, the Roman Republic was also home to a host of morally ambiguous characters. The early Republic is perhaps better known for its heroes—Brutus, Horatius, Cloelia, or Mucius—but even within the characterizations of these seemingly virtuous Romans there is room for accusations of lateness, inadequacy, and decline. The hallmarks of decadence can be found in the long history of Rome, from its foundation through to its “fall” in the West. As such, the moral and material stagnation that is so familiar from decadent references to Imperial Rome can be usefully understood as a result of the decline that was always present in the state and appears even in the biographies of its most illustrious citizens.

Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan

The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.


1893 ◽  
Vol 39 (165) ◽  
pp. 217-224
Author(s):  
M. J. Nolan

At the present time, when our fin de siècle knowledge of “general paralysis” enables us to recognize under that generic term many types of the disorder, and when the relation between it and syphilis continues a rather vexed question, little apology is needed for introducing to notice the following cases. They illustrate unmistakably some of the instances in which syphilis is solely responsible for what. Is termed by Dr. Savage” A process of degeneration which ultimately produces the ruin we recognize as general paralysis.”∗ Whatever may be hereafter formulated from the present evolutionary crisis in the history of the disorder there can be but little doubt that syphilis will be one of its most intimate and important relations. The story of its methods is briefly sketched in the following two short life-histories—in one asserting itself in the offspring of its victims by right of impure heredity, in the other carrying death direct into the vital centres by the force of its malignant virus.


Author(s):  
Nicolai Von Eggers ◽  
Mathias Hein Jessen

Michel Foucault developed his now (in)famous neologism governmentality in the first of the two lectures he devoted to ’a history of governmentality, Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). Foucault developed this notion in order to do a historical investigation of ‘the state’ or ‘the political’ which did not assume the entity of the state but treated it as a way of governing, a way of thinking about governing. Recently, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has taken up Foucault’s notion of governmentality in his writing of a history of power in the West, most notably in The Kingdom and the Glory. It is with inspiration from Agamben’s recent use of Foucault that Foucault’s approach to writing the history of the state (as a history of governmental practices and the reflection hereof) is revisited. Foucault (and Agamben) thus offer another way of writing the history of the state and of the political, which focuses on different texts and on reading more familiar texts in a new light, thereby offering a new and notably different view on the emergence of the modern state and politics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Anna Ceglarska ◽  

History of the rise of the Roman Republic as described by Polybius The aim of this article is to refer Polybius’s political theory, included in Book VI of The Histories, to the history of the rise of the Roman Republic. This theme must have been particularly significant for Polybius. For him, Rome was the most perfect example of a mixed government system, and the aim of describing its history was to show the development of this perfect system. The article presents the mutual relation of theory and history, starting with the period of kingship, up to the emergence of the democratic element, i.e. the moment when Rome acquired the mixed system of government. Both the political and social contexts of the changes are outlined. The analysis suggests that Polybius related his political theory to the history of the state he admired, thus providing the theory with actual foundations. Reconstructing his analysis makes it possible to see the history of Rome in a different light, and to ponder the system itself and its decline, even though the main objective of both Polybius and this article is to present its development.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (19) ◽  
pp. 185-188
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Zavaliy

The modern history of Ukraine shows that the nation seeks to advance on the European path and meet the level of civilization development of the West. In this state of affairs, one can not ignore the rights of citizens, which are a state-building principle for European communities, namely, the primordial rights and freedoms of its citizens. The European face of Ukraine is formed from many components, including the importance of religious relations in the state, within which the freedom of citizens in general is determined. In 2015, Pope Francis recalled that religious freedom is "a fundamental right that forms the way by which we interact socially and personally with people who are around us, whose religious views may differ from ours."


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-533
Author(s):  
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Linda K. Hughes

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.


Author(s):  
Emily Coit

This chapter revisits a site of foundational feminist scholarship to ask new questions about gender, class, race, health and motherhood. Examining two iconic fin-de-siècle female writers, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Gilman, it highlights an age-old tension in their work, articulated via contemporary eugenics, between the portrayal of the female body and that of the female intellect. It shows that both writers held antiquated views about female agency that sit uncomfortably with their common association with feminism and modernity.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...


1999 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 75-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Bujić

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.


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