Germaine de Staël’s and the Early Usage of Improvisation in English

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
New Information

This chapter describes the emergence of the terminology of improvisation in the English language. Terms relating to improvisation began to appear in the eighteenth century and came to be used frequently in the nineteenth. Germaine de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne ou L’Italie (published in French and translated into English the same year) was an important part of this emergence of improvisation. By attending to the content and language of Corinne, including the novel’s earliest translations, the chapter argues that the novel helped create a sense of improvisation as an Italianate artistic practice with political overtones specific to the context of the Napoleonic Wars. For the Staëlian improviser, art and history alike progress not toward pre-ordained goals but by taking new information into account and improvising new ends.

The Novel in English in Africa to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Ten Kortenaar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
English Language ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mission Schools ◽  
European Languages ◽  
African Novel ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Alphabetic Writing

This chapter focuses on English-language novels in Africa. The novel as a genre came to Africa from Europe along with European languages, alphabetic writing, and the printing press. The first English-language novels were written by white settlers, and, before 1950, the African novel in English is nearly synonymous with the South African novel. Black Africans first came in contact with the novel at mission schools where English fiction was part of the curriculum. In spite of these origins, however, African fiction should not be considered a mere offshoot of European literature, for the task of writing fiction in Africa required a reinvention of the genre. Adapting the conventions inherited from Europe to describe colonial societies and to narrate African dilemmas was a task not unlike that faced by the originators of the novel in England and France in the eighteenth century.

Generating Captain Cook and Paul Kane into Published Authors: Case Studies of a Book History Model for Exploration and Travel Writing (pp 7-56)

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian MacLaren
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

As more and more research occurs into published English-language travel literature, the production of individual texts, rather than their authorship alone, demands attention. Both the unreliability of the text as entirely the traveller's or explorer's own and the question of whether or not the text narrates only his own experience and observations have made problematical the matter of interpretation. Recently, Percy G. Adams has shown in Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983) how, because travel writing issued often enough from writers who did no more than move around in an armchair, this genre and the novel grew indistinguishable for a time in the early eighteenth century. From then on, travel literature would often exemplify a more complex, or at least less straightforward, relation between experience and language than one might expect.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This book is the first volume in a twelve-volume series presenting a history of English-language prose fiction. The titles in this series are concerned with novels as a whole, not just the ‘literary’ novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies. This book explores the long period between the origins of printing in late fifteenth-century England and the establishment of the novel as a recognized, reputable genre in the mid-eighteenth century. Later chapters in the volume provide original, authoritative accounts of innovations by the major canonical authors, notably Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, who have traditionally been seen as pioneering ‘the rise of the novel’, in Ian Watt's famous phrase. With its extended chronological and geographical range, however, the volume also contextualizes these eighteenth-century developments in revelatory new ways, to provide a fresh, bold, and comprehensive account of the richness and variety of fictional traditions as they developed over two and a half centuries.

Sylvia's Lovers

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Imagined Lives

He’s spoilt my life,- he’s spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth.’ The compelling story of an ordinary girl’s tragic passion for a man who disappears, Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) is Elizabeth Gaskell’s last completed novel. Set in a fictional Whitby at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel is a modern revenge tragedy in which well-intentioned actions have unforeseen and terrible human consequences. Sylvia is loved by two men, her serious cousin Philip and the charismatic sailor Charley Kinraid. When one of them betrays her, her path in life seems fixed. Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars and the ever-present threat of press-gangs, the story darkens when Sylvia’s father is roused into vengeful violence. But this trouble proves only the precursor to a greater calamity that will radically alter Sylvia’s future. Gaskell’s novel, richly engaging with the legacy of the Brontë sisters, is her most extensive literary exploration of the tragic depths of unregarded, unhistoric, but vividly imagined lives.

scholarly journals Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (34) ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Renata Dal Sasso Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This article aims to analyze the 1814 novel The Wanderer, or female difficulties by English writer Frances Burney and how its depiction of Britain at the time of the French Revolution can contribute to the understanding of the emergence of what François Hartog called the modern regime of historicity. Like many authors analyzed by Hartog in his books Regimes of Historicityand Croire en Histoire, Burney was personally affected by the French revolutionary process, a fact that is reflected in her last work. However, the time of its publication – when the Napoleonic Wars were at their end – made it outdated, something that was compounded by the debates regarding the Revolution and issues of gender that it was steeped in. By analyzing this novel, I will argue that issues of gender also played a role in the changes of how men and women related to time at this period as part of the transformations in the concept of History that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century.

On-line testing as a new method of student knowledge evaluation

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-356
Author(s):  
V.P. Kovalchuk ◽  
I.M. Kovalenko ◽  
S.V. Kovalenko ◽  
V.M. Burkot ◽  
V.O. Kovalenko
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
English Language ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Personality Testing ◽  
Online Testing ◽  
Training Time ◽  
Internet Resources ◽  
New Information ◽  
On Line ◽  
Use Of The Internet

Innovations change the world in all spheres of life, and education is not an exception. Modern requirements of time put us new challenges that require the use of new information technologies at all stages of the educational process in higher education institutions, in particular the use of the Internet. In addition, it has been noted that Internet resources increase motivation and contribute to the formation of a fully developed personality. Testing and evaluating students' knowledge and abilities is an integral part of the credit-module system. One of the forms of evaluation of the initial level of knowledge, consolidation and improvement of assimilation of information is testing. It should be noted that in a number of countries, testing has shifted traditional forms of control — oral and written exams and interviews. However, in Ukraine, educators remain adherents of a combination of testing and classical analysis of material. It allows the most efficient distribution of the training time of a practical class, 100% control of the knowledge and the effectiveness of mastering the material of all the students of the academic group. Technical progress stimulates the search for new variants and possibilities of testing, its various variations. One of the options that can help solve this problem was a smartphone. In order to facilitate the work of the teacher at the Department of Microbiology, an online testing system with the use of smartphones was introduced. Online testing is conducted among students with Ukrainian and English language training. With the Google Forms platform, the teacher creates a form which contains the student's records and tests. Students directly from the teacher get a link to fill out an online form directly at the lesson. For testing, a database containing standard KROK-1 licensed test tasks is used. The form can contain any number of test tasks that are in arbitrary order, as well as a changed order of distractors, which makes it impossible to write off. At the same time, all students are in the same conditions: all write one option. After submitting the form, the student receives a notification that his response is recorded. Re-linking is not possible. In turn, the teacher receives a message on the result of the test in the table — the ratio of correct answers to the total number of questions, as well as options for their answers. First and foremost, questions are displayed on which students gave the largest number of incorrect answers. This allows the topic to be considered in the process of discussion of the most difficult tasks from the students perspective, and in the future it will allow more efficiently to create forms for on-line tests and to focus on these issues.

Inventing the English Massacre

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Games
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Violent Event ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
British Culture

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

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