The Baroque as Anti-Classicism: The French Case

Author(s):  
Larry F. Norman

This chapter examines the rising mid-twentieth-century attention to the Baroque as a challenge to “French Classicism.” The concept of the literary Baroque faced strong opposition in France, where it undermined a critical tradition that isolated the “Age of Louis XIV” from European-wide currents. After World War II, the transnational Baroque provided a model for a more cosmopolitan view of the seventeenth century. Its integration into French literary and cultural history, however, reverses established paradigms of cultural evolution and periodization according to which Renaissance Classicism is followed by Counter-Reformation Baroque. This development also raises questions concerning the intellectual and ideological underpinning of the Baroque, including its relation to monarchy and Cartesian modernity. Authors examined include foundational figures of comparative literature (Erich Auerbach, E. R. Curtius, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek), art critics and historians (Eugenio d’Ors, Arnold Hauser, Victor-L. Tapié), and pioneers of the French Baroque (Jean Rousset, Marcel Raymond).

Author(s):  
Yolonda Youngs

This study traces the development and evolution of Snake River use and management through an in-depth exploration of historic commercial scenic river guiding and concessions on the upper Snake River in Grand Teton National Park (GRTE) from 1950 to the present day. The research is based on a combination of methods including archival research, oral history analysis, historical landscape analysis, and fieldwork. I suggest that a distinct cultural community of river runners and outdoor recreationalists developed in Grand Teton National Park after World War II. In GRTE, a combination of physical, cultural, and technical forces shaped this community’s evolution including the specific geomorphology and dynamic channel patterns of the upper Snake River, the individuals and groups that worked on this river, and changes in boat and gear technology over time. The following paper presents the early results from the first year of this project in 2016 including the work of a graduate student and myself. This study offers connections between the upper Snake River and Grand Teton National Park to broader national trends in the evolution of outdoor recreation and concessions in national parks, the impact of World War II on technological developments for boating, and the cultural history of adventure outdoor recreation and tourism in the United States.   Featured photo by Elton Menefee on Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/AHgCFeg-gXg


1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
pp. 1040-1042 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. T. Yap ◽  
S. M. Tang

Quantitative determination of barium in Chinese porcelains from the seventeenth century to modern times together with some modern non-Chinese porcelains was made with the use of calibration curves obtained by the addition method. All Chinese porcelains from K'ang Hsi (Kangxi, 1662–1722) up to World War II were found to have a barium content between 100 ppm and 130 ppm. For those made after World War II, the barium content varies from 60 ppm to 7000 ppm, and only a few pieces are in the range from 100 ppm to 130 ppm, making it possible to identify most of the modern fake reproductions.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Onion

Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Simonsson ◽  
Glenn Sandström

This study outlines a long history of divorce in Sweden, recognizing the importance of considering both economic and cultural factors in the analysis of marital dissolution. Following Ansley Coale, the authors examine how a framework of multiple theoretical constructs, in interaction, can be applied to the development toward mass divorce. Applying a long historical perspective, the authors argue that an analysis of gendered aspects of the interaction between culture and economics is crucial for the understanding of the rise of mass divorce. The empirical analysis finds support for a marked decrease in legal and cultural obstacles to divorce already during the first decades of the twentieth century. However, economic structures remained a severe obstacle that prohibited significant increases in divorce rate prior to World War II. It was only during the 1940s and 1960s, when cultural change was complemented by marked decreases in economic interdependence between spouses, that the divorce rate exhibited significant increases. The authors find that there are advantages to looking at the development of divorce as a history in which multiple empirical factors are examined in conjunction, recognizing that these factors played different roles during different time periods.


Author(s):  
Helen Callaghan

The French case serves as a reminder that the timing and magnitude of policy feedback effects are historically contingent. Compared to their German and British counterparts, French incumbents faced fewer challenges and weaker constraints prior to World War II, and a correspondingly stronger political backlash thereafter. The first set of reforms was more severely market-restraining, and gave rise to a new breed of sheltered incumbents closely connected to the state. As in other countries and time periods, and like market-enabling rules, the market-restraining French arrangements had self-reinforcing feedback effects: They effectively suppressed the rise of a pro-market clientele. As in Germany, self-undermining feedback effects countervailed. As in Britain, the first steps toward marketization gave rise to a fledgling takeover industry interested in market expansion. However, unlike in Britain, the growth of this pro-market clientele was nipped in the bud by the unfavorable economic climate of the 1970s.


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