Matters of Life and Death: Biographies at the Beginning of Independent Mexico, 1820s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Racine
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Print Form ◽  
National Life ◽  
Collective Meaning ◽  
Independence Era

Biographies are a sort of resurrection. They reanimate a life after death to draw collective meaning from individual sacrifice and offer a model of salvation for others to follow. Although still a relatively new genre, the few full-length biographies of Mexico’s independence-era leaders that were written during the 1820s contributed significantly to the process of identifying aspirational national virtues by embodying them in the stories of individual exemplary lives. Biographies of heroes began to appear from the earliest years of Mexico’s national life, as political independence became a settled reality and attention started to turn to the daunting tasks of giving it an institutional form. In the burgeoning nineteenth century, Romantic ideals animated the actions soldiers and statesmen alike: dreams of nationhood and belonging, praise for heroic individuals who embodied the spirit of their age, a taste for tragic adventure and self-sacrifice for a greater cause. These biographies appeared at the beginning, stories of Mexicans whose exemplary lives transcended their deaths and went on to achieve immortality in print form.

The Religious Functions of Near-Death Experiences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Schlieter
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Near Death Experiences

This final chapter secures the result of the survey by discussing the religious functions of near-death experiences for affected individuals, but also the functions of the reports for the audience. It outlines (a) ontological, (b) epistemic, (c) intersubjective, and (d) moral aspects. It has been argued that experiencers feel closer to God, are less attracted to religion, and are significantly more inclined to believe in life after death. A function of the narratives consists in the claim that, in atheistic and secular times, individual religious experience is still possible. Several reports argue with a copresence of life and death. Discussing cognitivist approaches, the chapter finally concludes that, given the Latin etymology of “experience,” harboring, among others, the meaning of “being exposed to danger” or “passing a test,” near-death experiences can be seen as a match for conceptions of religious experience as a transformative, gained by surviving a life-threatening danger.

The Story of an African Farm

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olive Schreiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
New Man ◽  
Female Nurse

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.

The Natural Stage: Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219
Author(s):  
Chandra Owenby Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Full Length

Noted British actress Fanny Kemble lived eighty-four years on and off the theatrical and political stages of the nineteenth century. Kemble was an active writer who authored her first five-act play, Francis the First, at the age of eighteen. She would go on to write at least ten other published works, including a second full-length play, multiple journals recording her personal observations, notes on Shakespeare, and poetry collections. While Kemble remained devoted to writing as personal practice throughout her life, her most well-known piece of writing is her 1863 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. Kemble's journal documents her outrage and disgust at the living conditions, harsh daily existence, and enslaved individuals she encountered while living on the two Sea Island plantations that her husband, Pierce Butler, inherited off the coast of Georgia.

A Bibliography of British Travel Books on Argentina: 1810-1860

1959 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Samuel Trifilo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Travel Books ◽  
The World ◽  
Written Word ◽  
Source Of Information

Books of travel and books inspired by travel have probably been more popular in Great Britain than any other literary form, with the exception of novels.This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when travel, owing to the lack of today's facilities, was reserved for the relative few. During that period, photography had not yet replaced the written word, as is happening in our own generation. The nineteenth-century Englishman wandered through the medium of a travel book and not through newsreels, travelogues, and even full-length movies. Today, the Englishman, like the American, is able to sit in his living room and see the world on his television screen. He is not dependent on literature to the extent that his grandfather or great-grandfather was. For the Englishman of the nineteenth century, therefore, travel literature was very important. Often, these books furnished the only source of information concerning strange lands and strange peoples.

On the Rise of Postwar Military Dictatorships: Argentina, Chile, Greece

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicos Mouzelis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Sociocultural Differences ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Latin American Countries

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.

Active Dead or Alive: Some Kenyan Views About the Agency of Luo and Luyia Women Pre- and Post-Mortem

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Significant Part ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Community Agency ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Western Kenya ◽  
Indigenous Religion ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Life After Death

AbstractPaying attention to burial disputes can help us to understand better matters relating to gender, kinship, community, agency, and power. Since Luo and Luyia believe that life after death is a significant part of a person's life, paying attention to 'the hold death has' upon people is important, as are the writing of 'life-and-death histories.' The paper presents three cases, one involving a Luyia woman and two involving Luo women in which the women involved have, in the views of community members, shown the ability to manipulate kinship structures and strictures pre- and post-mortem. The paper seeks to challenge views that have depicted women in western Kenya as passive pawns of a particularly patriarchal form of patriliny. The paper discusses the effect religion has on views about death and burial, and examines the influence of indigenous religion, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Legio Maria on these cases.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

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