Literature, Society, and Politics

Author(s):  
Werner Mackenbach

The historiography of Central American literature from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on the relationships between literature, (literary) history, and the political field, especially within the context of projects centered on national construction, is essential. The approach here analyzes the different periods—or moments of change or transition—regarding the relations between politics, society, and culture from the perspective of historical change, concentrating on “microperiods” characterized by a paradigm shift with respect to the relationships between literature, history, politics and society: the nineteenth century (the post-independence moment); the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; the 1930s–1960s; the 1960s–1990s; and the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. A set of proposals aims at filling the gaps, developing the desiderata, and coping with the challenges in literary historiography in and about Central America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marietta Messmer

The instrumentalization of nineteenth-century literary historiography in the project of literary and cultural nation building has become a critical commonplace, as Claudio Guillén (6) and David Perkins (4), among many others, have outlined. Beginning with John Neal's American Writers (1824–25), nineteenth-century histories of North American literature emphatically embraced this nationalist paradigm, striving to identify and defend the “American” qualities in America's newly emergent national literature. But when called on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to justify the establishment of American literature departments in universities across the country, literary histories were, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, under even greater pressure to prove the extent to which American literature is indeed American (Vanderbilt 186–91). Although the rise of New Criticism and the influence of Russian formalism after World War II saw a temporary setback to American historiographical nationalism (Spengemann, Mirror 154), the subsequent institutionalization of American studies took place in the context of the cold war, and the 1960s, in particular, brought a renewed emphasis on the (for the most part nationally oriented) sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature. And even the shift to intra-American cultural pluralism in the wake of trans- and subnational challenges to traditional notions of the nation-state throughout the past few decades has all too frequently been accompanied by renewed attempts to establish a revised version of historiographical nationalism.


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.


Author(s):  
Thomas A. Hose

Many of the stakeholders involved in modern geotourism provision lack awareness of how the concept essentially ermeged, developed and was defined in Europe. Such stakeholders are unaware of how many of the modern approaches to landscape promotion and interpretation actually have nineteeth century antecedents. Similarly, many of the apparently modern threats to, and issues around, the protection of wild and fragile landscapes and geoconservation of specific geosites also first emerged in the ninetheeth century; the solutions that were developed to address those threats and issues were first applied in the early twentieth century and were subsequently much refined by the opening of the twenty-first century. However, the European engagement with wild and fragile landscapes as places to be appreciated and explored began much earlier than the nineteenth century and can be traced back to Renaissance times. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a summary consideration of this rather neglected aspect of geotourism, initially by considering its modern recognition and definitions and then by examining the English Lake District (with further examples from Britain and Australia available at the website) as a particular case study along with examples.


Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-71
Author(s):  
Dominik Finkelde ◽  

How can a set throw itself into itself and remain a set and an element of itself at the same time? This is obviously impossible, as Bertrand Russell has prominently shown. One simply cannot pick a trash can up and throw it into itself. Now, Hegel and Badiou, but also the anti-Hegelian W. Benjamin, take different positions on the subject when they refer time and again to versions of “concrete universality” as an oxymoronic structure that touches ontologically upon their theoretical as well as their practical philosophies. The article tries to show how the philosophers affirm the mentioned paradox as central for the understanding of Dialectical Materialism in its classical (nineteenth-century) as well as in its modern (twentieth-century) and contemporary (twenty-first-century) understanding.


Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.


Author(s):  
Kathryn S. Olmstead

Although many Americans believe that conspiratorial thinking is reaching new heights in the twenty-first century, conspiracy theories have been commonplace throughout U.S. history. In the colonial and early republic eras, Americans feared that Catholics, Jews, Masons, Indians, and African Americans were plotting against them. In the nineteenth century they added international bankers, rich businessmen, and Mormons to the list of potential conspirators. In the twentieth century, conspiracy theories continued to evolve, and many Americans began to suspect the U.S. government itself of plotting against them. These theories gained more credibility after the revelation of real government conspiracies, notably CIA assassination plots, the Watergate scandal, and the Iran–-Contra affair.


Author(s):  
Stuart Piggin

Because evangelicalism has been arguably the strongest expression of Christianity in Australia, Edwards, as one of its principal founders, has been a seminal presence. The explicit reception of his writings, however, was not extensive in the nineteenth century and was most evident among Presbyterian clergy. In the twentieth century he was central to the ‘marriage mysticism’ of the Reformed theologians attached to the New Creation Teaching Ministry headed by the Rev. Geoff Bingham, an Edwards aficionado. At the end of the twentieth century, Edwards was increasingly cited by both supporters and opponents of the Charismatic movement. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has been the subject of increasingly sophisticated academic inquiry. His spirituality and ecclesiology have been studied with a view to benefitting especially evangelical churches, while his trinitarian theology has been quarried by those, not necessarily evangelicals, who have been captivated by Edwards’s thinking on creation and design.


2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-60
Author(s):  
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

The impact of foreign building traditions on Chinese architecture had been limited until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, dramatic changes in construction occurred as the result of the introduction of Western architectural practice and methods of architectural history, as China transformed from an imperial society to a republic to a communist state. In Chinese Architectural History in the Twenty-First Century, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the state of architectural history in China at the end of the twentieth century and the impact that recent social and cultural transformations are likely to have on the field in the future.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (6a) ◽  
pp. 701-705 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cannon

AbstractObjectiveTo outline the history of dietetics since its beginnings in recorded history, and of nutrition science in its first phase beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and then its second phase in the second half of the twentieth century.MethodThree narrative overviews: of dietetics from its beginnings until after the end of the mediaeval and then Renaissance periods in Europe; of nutrition science in its first phase from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, with reasons for its rise; and of nutrition science in its second phase in the second half of the twentieth century, with reasons for its decline.ConclusionsIn its third phase in the twenty-first century, the new nutrition science should regain much of the vision and scope of its preceding disciplines.


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