William Carleton, Irish song, and the art of keening

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Earls
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
The Dead ◽  
William Carleton

William Carleton was evidently familiar with wide traditions of Irish-language song, particularly through the singing in Irish of his mother. and this experience is evident throughout his writings. In addition to the explicit citation and celebrations of song in his work are less immediately recognised ways in which Carleton absorbed traditions of Irish singing into his fiction, particularly the form of caoineadh, or laments for the dead. Relatively few examples of early caointe (keens) have survived from the province of Ulster. However, this chapter argues that the practices of early nineteenth-century keening, as performed in Ulster, can be glimpsed in the novels and short stories of William Carleton. Close comparison of an extended fictional prose description in Valentine M’Clutchy (1845) with various accounts of caointe (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire by Eibhlín Dhubh and a declamation recorded in 1828 by the County Kilkenny schoolmaster Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin) indicates Carleton’s evident knowledge of Irish traditions of lament. Irish song is shown to be typified by its lyric, non-narrative form and to be marked with particular emotional intensity, elements still visible within the prose recreations in English of Carleton’s fiction.

Donizetti's Gothic Resurrections

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melina Esse
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead

Abstract The preponderance of gothic themes in Italian operas of the early nineteenth century is often cited as one of the few ways essentially conservative Italian composers flirted with the Romantic revolution sweeping the rest of Europe. By 1838, the very ubiquity of these tropes led the Venetian reviewer of Donizetti's gory Maria de Rudenz to plead ““exhaustion”” with the ever-present ““daggers, poisons, and tombs”” of the contemporary stage. Based on the French melodrama La Nonne sanglante, Donizetti's sensational opera is almost a litany of gothic tropes. The most disturbing of these is the female body that refuses to die: Maria herself, who rises from the dead to murder her innocent rival. This fleshy specter is musically rendered as a body that is too receptive to emotion, particularly to (imaginary) cries of longing or grief. Significantly, Donizetti's foray into the gothic was also distinguished by a spate of self-borrowing; his 1838 revision of the earlier Gabriella di Vergy borrows material from Maria de Rudenz. Exploring the connections between the trope of gothic resurrection and Donizetti's borrowings highlights how the two works represent a characteristic approach to the gothic, one that mingles a corporeal orientation with more familiar themes of ghostly immateriality.

The Melville Monument and the Shaping of the Scottish Metropolis

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarisse Godard Desmarest
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Grid Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Town ◽  
National Monument ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The City

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

Changing the Dead to Statues of Stone: The Synthesis of Fossils, Petrifaction, Photography, and the Chemistry of the Gorgonean Arts

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-308
Author(s):  
Irina Podgorny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chemical Nature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chemical Substances ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Chemical Complex ◽  
The Dead

Taking the story of Efisio Marini as its starting point, this paper argues that embalming and photography are materially and historically connected due to their chemical nature. Photography and modern embalming both originated in the “chemical complex” of the nineteenth century, i.e., the idea that nature and natural processes could be synthesized in the laboratory. As Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have remarked, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chemists experimented with materials, studied the possibilities for improving their production, examined their properties, explored their reactions, and analyzed their composition. Eighteenth-century chemistry, in their words, could be seen as the most authoritative science of materials. Marini’s story relates to this ontology of materials in that it refers to experiments with chemical substances and subsequent changes in their materiality and meaning.

scholarly journals Native and Non-native Saints in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Irish-Language Charm Historiolas

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-334
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Strong Link ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth

AbstractAn examination of surviving healing charm texts originating in Ireland between 1700 and the mid-nineteenth century suggests a strong link between the contents of this corpus and a select few national saints (Columcille, Bridget, and Patrick) and international Catholic religious figures (Christ, Mary, and the Apostles). By contrast, local Irish saints, which otherwise figure so prominently in religious practices of the time, are significantly underrepresented in the Irish charm corpus of this time period. This essay looks at the long-term status of highly localized saints in religious and medical discourse, the effect of church centralization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the rise of select national saints as factors in this feature of the Irish charms.

Remember Me

2020 ◽  
pp. 557-577
Author(s):  
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

This chapter explores the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility as it took form in popular culture in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Although later generations made fun of the weeping sentimentality of parlor poetry and embroidered memorials to the dead, nineteenth-century Americans believed that a pen mark on a page or a twined lock of hair could animate invisible chords in the body that connected one person to another through memory. To write about Mormonism in relation to sensibility may seem odd, since to outsiders the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seemed the epitome of grim-faced patriarchy, with its embrace of polygamy and attempt at theocratic government. A closer look at the rich materials preserved in its archives shows the many ways in which early Saints used common cultural forms to express unique religious belief such as baptism for the dead. Latter-day Saints celebrated plural unions in the language of sentimental friendship. Like other Americans, they used tangible things to cross boundaries of space and time.

The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015

2020 ◽  
pp. 405-423
Author(s):  
Melissa Fegan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
John Banville ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
William Carleton ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers Irish writers’ continual reimagining of the Great Famine and the way it has shaped understandings of the past and present. In doing so, it addresses novels and short stories from nineteenth-century writers such as William Carleton, Mary Anne Hoare, and Margaret Brew, who sought to explain or reinterpret the catastrophe while it was still a living memory. The return of the Famine in later historical and neo-Victorian fiction by writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, John Banville, and Joseph O’Connor is considered in light of the association between Famine fiction and various crises in the post-independence era. The discussion also extends to the resurgence in literary interest in the Famine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which, the chapter suggests, was due not only to the greater exposure of the Famine in public discourse but also to a revival of insecurities that seemed to belong to the past.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Sean M. Parr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Bel Canto ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Word Painting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Singers

The Introduction sets forth a brief history of coloratura singing and identifies historical questions, issues, and contexts in scholarly literature. From opera’s origins, composers employed melismatic text treatment to highlight a singer’s agility, range, and the character’s emotional intensity, as well as for frequent moments of word painting. This tradition of solo singing was still prominent during the “bel canto” period of the early nineteenth century when composers employed coloratura vocal writing as part of normal melodic text treatment. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, coloratura was a rare feature in operatic vocal writing. Coloratura also shifted to the domain of female singers, and often particular sopranos. In providing a historical context for the study of singing, gender, and nineteenth-century opera, the author proposes that the increasing specificity of coloratura led to its eventual identity as a voice-type, becoming an indicator of the modern.

The Life of the Dead: Karl Marx in Context

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Peter C. Caldwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Actual Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead

In Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Gareth Stedman Jones draws a distinction between Marx’s nineteenth-century views and those of twentieth-century Marxism, which abandoned ideas of Marx that seemed outdated. Stedman Jones’ careful reconstruction of Marx’s philosophical, political, and economic thought in the context of the new social thought of the early nineteenth century, however, reveals aspects of Marx that returned to challenge official Marxism. In this respect, Stedman Jones’ conception of intellectual history as the careful placement of ideas in their historical context conflicts with his actual practice of intellectual history, which discovers challenges to the present in past debates.

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