Bunyan and the Historians

Author(s):  
Tamsin Spargo

This chapter offers a chronological account of varying historical and historicist approaches to the life and writings of John Bunyan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The theoretical assumptions of major scholars in the field are highlighted, from a Whig such as Macaulay in the nineteenth century to a Marxist such as Christopher Hill in the twentieth, to more recent work by contemporary historians such as Richard L. Greaves and N. H. Keeble. It explores changing conceptions of the relationship between text and context, and past, present, and future, as they have informed research, analysis, historiography, and interpretation within the developing disciplines of History and of English Literature. This exploration is coupled with a consideration of the often unacknowledged relationship between teleological conceptions of history and the practice of historical research and historiography.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Haiman Liu

<p>The images of maidens in Italian opera and German lieder from the period 1800-1850 are vivid. In the plots of the operas and the scenes and stories of the lieder almost invariably these characters focus enthusiastically on heartfelt love. This exegesis explores the relationship between the expression of love by unmarried women in selected lieder and opera of the first half of the nineteenth century and performance of these works by the young soprano in the twenty-first century. In the period when these songs and operas were written, performers of lieder would often have been of a similar age to the maiden characters portrayed in the songs, and in the case of Italian opera at the time, the singers who created such roles were usually in their twenties or early thirties. As a young soprano myself, in my study I consider some questions which are relevant for twenty-first century female singers who choose to perform these nineteenth-century portrayals of virgin characters. The figures in the works I have selected to study display a wide variety of personalities, moods and emotions, from the tenacious wild rose in Schubert’s ‘Heidenröslein’, to his passionate Gretchen and the melancholic Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. I consider how the soprano may express the different emotions involved and approach performing young maiden characters such as these, whose experiences of life and status in society may be substantially removed from twenty-first century experiences.   In order to address these questions, I examine the selected song and aria texts in terms of the relationship between the content of the stories and the characters, as well as analyzing the vocal skills that can be used and vocal effects that may be applied when shaping these roles according to the music as written. In addition, I combine the background to the story and the plot with the musical markings in selected phrases to explore the emotional variety of the characters so as to interpret the deeper significance in the compositions. Through learning and performing these particular pieces I have explored the vocal techniques which are required in singing them from a practical perspective and this enables me to contribute insights I have gained to the general understanding of the skills required for this particular area of the repertoire. Having chosen repertoire for this study which combines Italian opera arias and lieder, and I also consider how the differences I have found in the vocal works may reflect their respective genres and distinguish the skills required for each. Through writing about my own research into the performance of these works, I provide new insights and ideas about these maiden characters which may be applicable to any young sopranos who sing repertoire from this period, and useful for their own vocal perfo</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Haiman Liu

<p>The images of maidens in Italian opera and German lieder from the period 1800-1850 are vivid. In the plots of the operas and the scenes and stories of the lieder almost invariably these characters focus enthusiastically on heartfelt love. This exegesis explores the relationship between the expression of love by unmarried women in selected lieder and opera of the first half of the nineteenth century and performance of these works by the young soprano in the twenty-first century. In the period when these songs and operas were written, performers of lieder would often have been of a similar age to the maiden characters portrayed in the songs, and in the case of Italian opera at the time, the singers who created such roles were usually in their twenties or early thirties. As a young soprano myself, in my study I consider some questions which are relevant for twenty-first century female singers who choose to perform these nineteenth-century portrayals of virgin characters. The figures in the works I have selected to study display a wide variety of personalities, moods and emotions, from the tenacious wild rose in Schubert’s ‘Heidenröslein’, to his passionate Gretchen and the melancholic Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. I consider how the soprano may express the different emotions involved and approach performing young maiden characters such as these, whose experiences of life and status in society may be substantially removed from twenty-first century experiences.   In order to address these questions, I examine the selected song and aria texts in terms of the relationship between the content of the stories and the characters, as well as analyzing the vocal skills that can be used and vocal effects that may be applied when shaping these roles according to the music as written. In addition, I combine the background to the story and the plot with the musical markings in selected phrases to explore the emotional variety of the characters so as to interpret the deeper significance in the compositions. Through learning and performing these particular pieces I have explored the vocal techniques which are required in singing them from a practical perspective and this enables me to contribute insights I have gained to the general understanding of the skills required for this particular area of the repertoire. Having chosen repertoire for this study which combines Italian opera arias and lieder, and I also consider how the differences I have found in the vocal works may reflect their respective genres and distinguish the skills required for each. Through writing about my own research into the performance of these works, I provide new insights and ideas about these maiden characters which may be applicable to any young sopranos who sing repertoire from this period, and useful for their own vocal perfo</p>


Author(s):  
Simpson Gerry

This chapter suggests that the law of sovereignty and statehood tends to be practiced, organized, and theorized around two sets of argument (and a sleight of hand), and that this tendency has produced certain effects on the distribution of political resources in global politics. The first argument is structured around the material and immaterial qualities of statehood, as it maintains that the ‘infinite transition’ discussed by Peter Fitzpatrick is produced partly by the elasticity of the doctrinal ground and partly by the remarkable stability of a very particular and idealized sovereign subject. The second argument rests on an idiom of fragmentation and unity, by juxtaposing an apparent golden age of post-Charter state sovereignty with both a decentralized nineteenth-century sovereignty, and a more protean, early twenty-first century sovereignty. Finally, the ‘sleight of hand’ operates around the relationship between routine statehood and sui generis sovereignty.


2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-200
Author(s):  
Edward Welch

Drawing on recent work by novelist Michel Houellebecq and photographer Raymond Depardon, this article examines the relationship between visual culture, spatial change and modernization in contemporary France. Investigating how Houellebecq foregrounds the visual representation of space in his novel La Carte et le territoire (2010), the article goes on to align the questions it raises with the six-year photographic tour of France undertaken by Raymond Depardon during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It considers Depardon's portrait of contemporary France in the context of his previous engagement with spatial change and state-led planning as part of the Mission photographique de la DATAR of the 1980s. It explores the vision of spatial layering and heterogeneity which emerges from the project, and discusses how it reasserts the importance of photography for capturing and articulating territorial identity and spatial change.


2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Snead

This article describes the editorial practices that Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley brought to their respective editions of The Life of David Brainerd, explains how those practices were informed by their opposing theological stances towards salvation, and traces the circulation and reception of each edition back to those theological stances. Finally, the article invokes classic models of the methodology of book history and recent work on the circulation of nineteenth-century evangelical publications, arguing that an understanding of the kind of theological editing eighteenth-century figures like Edwards and Wesley took can better help us to articulate nineteenth- and twentieth- (and twenty-first) century attitudes and assumptions about agency and material texts.


Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.


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):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Jack Santino

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.


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