Life Writing and the Victorians

2014 ◽  
pp. 44-62
Author(s):  
Trev Broughton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Past ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

This chapter uses Margaret Oliphant’s work on a biography of the deposed Church of Scotland preacher Edward Irving (1792–1834) as a case study in the professionalization of Life writing in the nineteenth century. It points to some of the literary developments and fashions that made biography popular despite its tendency to over-respectful, hyper-respectable treatment of its subjects. It charts some of the challenges and opportunities biographical evidence and research afforded, including the chance to probe the conventions of gender. It argues that biography offered a space in which authors—including authors outside the academy—could participate in the writing of the past and in the representation of local and national identities, as well as in the ongoing discussion about heroes and their role in Victorian culture.

scholarly journals Women's Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby Robinson

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-202
Author(s):  
Susan Civale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Feminine Persona

The posthumously published Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson (1801) has been read as a final – but flawed – attempt to defend the conduct and rescue the reputation of the notorious actress, poet, and one-time royal mistress, Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800). Narrating her life as a pathetic tale of transgression and suffering, the Memoirs seems destabilised by inconsistencies in structure and gaps in content which are often discussed by modern critics as shortcomings: evidence of self-censorship, ‘confused’ intentions, or an inability to fashion an acceptable feminine persona. However, these so-called shortcomings may comprise a nuanced strategy of self-presentation designed to evoke curiosity and sympathy. Robinson's Memoirs was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, spurring numerous novels, mini-biographies, and periodical articles. By examining nineteenth-century responses to the Memoirs, this essay argues for Robinson's life writing as innovative and influential, and gestures to the benefits of extending the traditional ‘edges’ of Romanticism in terms of both genre and period.

Stitching story and life together: Participatory textile making practices at a Harlem gallery

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 81-91
Author(s):  
Sarah Gerth van den Berg ◽  
Maria Liu Wong
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Learning Community ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
Relationship Building ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

What brings a tourist from Italy, a lifelong resident of Harlem and a graduate student from a local university together? Crochet hooks, knitting needles, an assortment of green acrylic yarn and time and space for community craftivism. This case study focuses on crossing boundaries through participatory textile making, making time and space for relationship building in the changing neighbourhood of Harlem and practicing institutional stewardship as a ‘good neighbour’. The Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center – the arts and research space of City Seminary of New York, an intercultural urban theological learning community – affords an opportunity to explore what happens when lives and stories are stitched together through participatory textile practices. Through the lenses of the EcCoWell learning neighbourhood approach and craftivism, this documentation and reflection of data from collaborative yarn bombing and community quilt-making projects over the past two years provide insights on lessons, challenges and opportunities of these community-oriented practices.

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

scholarly journals My history, your history, our history: Developing meaningful community engagement within historic sites and museums

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-321
Author(s):  
Jessica Stroja
Keyword(s):  
Community Engagement ◽  
Community Participation ◽  
Participatory Process ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Community Needs ◽  
Sense Of Ownership ◽  
The Past ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

AbstractVarying models of community engagement provide methods for museums to build valuable relationships with communities. These relationships hold the potential to become ongoing, dynamic opportunities for active community participation and engagement with museums. Nevertheless, the nuances of this engagement continue to remain a unique process that requires delicate balancing of museum obligations and community needs in order to ensure meaningful outcomes are achieved. This article discusses how community engagement can be an active, participatory process for visitors to museums. Research projects that utilise aspects of community-driven engagement models allow museums to encourage a sense of ownership and active participation with the museum. Indeed museums can balance obligations of education and representation of the past with long-term, meaningful community needs via projects that utilise aspects of community-driven engagement models. Using an oral history project at Historic Ormiston House as a case study,1 the article argues that museums and historic sites can encourage ongoing engagement through active community participation in museum projects. While this approach carries both challenges and opportunities for the museum, it opens doors to meaningful and long-term community engagement, allowing visitors to embrace the museum and its stories as active participants rather than as passive consumers.

Antislavery Orthodoxy: Isaac Nelson and the Free Church of Scotland, c. 1843–65

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
High Esteem

The ‘Send back the money’ controversy between the Free Church of Scotland and zealous abolitionists was one of the most important events in nineteenth century Scottish religious history. The Revd Isaac Nelson of Belfast is best remembered for his anti-revivalism and his advocacy of Irish nationalism. What has often been forgotten is the centrality of antislavery to the making of Nelson's controversial reputation, even though he was held in high esteem by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. Accordingly, this article examines his opposition to the Free Church's receipt of monies from and extension of christian fellowship to the slaveholding churches in the United States. It highlights his critique of leading ecclesiastical statesmen, including Thomas Chalmers, William Cunningham and Robert S. Candlish. The essay also considers the sophisticated intellectual critique of chattel slavery that under-girded Nelson's opposition to the policy of the Free Kirk, as well as his evaluation of the nature of proslavery religion in America. By means of a biographical case study of an interesting outsider, this article seeks to provide a lens through which one of the most tragic incidents in Scotland's ecclesiastical past can be freshly examined.

Kolumbus transnational: Verflochtene Geschichtskulturen und europäische Medienlandschaften im Kontext des 400. Jubiläums der Entdeckung Amerikas 1892

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-447
Author(s):  
Clara Frysztacka ◽  
Klaus Herborn ◽  
Martina Palli ◽  
Tobias Scheidt
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
European Regions ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Press ◽  
Historical Truth

Columbus in Transnational Perspective: Entangled Historical Cultures and European Media Landscapes in the Context of the 400th Anniversary of the Discovery of America (1892) While in historical research there is a general call for transnational history, the transnational level of historical cultures often remains under-represented. The latter has for long focused on the development of single national narratives when dealing with historical cultures. This is especially true for late nineteenth-century Europe, when the continent can be seen at the height of national divide and imperial ambition. Consequently, its historiographies are perceived to play a major role in the construction of separate national identities. By contrast, this article utilises the celebrations around the quartercentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas as a case study to analyse how forms of approaching, interpreting and transmitting history in different European contexts were deeply entangled. The study is based on illustrated newspapers and popular periodicals from five European regions, which provided access to textual and visual material for mass audiences to an unprecedented extent. The analysis of articles covering the anniversary unveils regional, national, transnational and pan-European patterns of historical sense-making. These affect historical narratives as well as the ways in which the press illustrated the past, produced historical truth, and created identification with the historical personage. Columbus and his deeds became symbols of modernism and embodiments of European superiority that were open for adaptation into different contexts. Therefore, historical cultures in Europe have to be characterised as both permeable and multi-dimensionally entangled.

scholarly journals The Cultural Genocide in Australia: A Case Study of the Forced Removal of Aborigine Children from 1912-1962

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 05002
Author(s):  
Nuriyeni Kartika Bintarsari
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Australian Government ◽  
White People ◽  
Native Title ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Genocide ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Sydney Australia

This paper will discuss the Forced Removal Policy of Aborigine children in Australia from 1912 to 1962. The Forced Removal Policy is a Government sponsored policy to forcibly removed Aborigine children from their parent’s homes and get them educated in white people households and institutions. There was a people’s movement in Sydney, Australia, and London, Englandin 1998to bring about “Sorry Books.” Australia’s “Sorry Books” was a movement initiated by the advocacy organization Australian for Native Title (ANT) to address the failure of The Australian government in making proper apologies toward the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. The objective of this paper is to examine the extent of cultural genocide imposed by the Australian government towards its Aborigine population in the past and its modern-day implication. This paper is the result of qualitative research using literature reviews of relevant materials. The effect of the study is in highlighting mainly two things. First, the debate on the genocidal intention of the policy itself is still ongoing. Secondly, to discuss the effect of past government policies in forming the shape of national identities, in this case, the relations between the Australian government and its Aborigine population.

scholarly journals Lived Historiography: National History as a Script to the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-57
Author(s):  
Pertti Haapala
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identities ◽  
History Writing ◽  
National History ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Past

AbstractThe chapter studies the role of historiography in experiencing the past. Haapala analyzes how written history and its conceptualizations offered people a framework for understanding, defining, and living the past emotionally, and understanding how their present experiences became connected to history. It is claimed here that academic historiography often played a major role in creating historical and national identities by providing a script, as well as intellectual and emotional tools, to live the past. National history was invented by nineteenth-century intellectuals and it became a powerful, imagined narrative for the nation for two centuries. That success can be explained only by realizing the societal and political role of history writing as an autobiography of a society.

scholarly journals Mobility, Transport and Social Inclusion: Lessons from History

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
British Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mobility System ◽  
The Rich

This paper argues that although it is now possible to travel more quickly and easily than ever before, transport-related social exclusion is more likely than it was in the past. Using evidence drawn from life writing and oral testimonies I examine the ways in which people accessed everyday transport over the past two centuries. In the early nineteenth century mobility options were limited and most people travelled in similar ways, though the rich always had access to the fastest and most comfortable transportation. From the mid-nineteenth century the railways provided fast travel for most people. Progressively, in the twentieth century British society became car dependent so that those without access to a car were disadvantaged. Such transport-related social exclusion was exacerbated by the denuding of public transport, and by heightened expectations for mobility which often could not be achieved. It is argued that a return to a less differentiated mobility system could increase transport-related social inclusion.

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