Geographies of Historical Discourse

Author(s):  
Roberto Dainotto

This chapter attempts to frame European Romanticism against the background of that ‘somewhat enigmatic event’ which, between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, was said by Foucault to have begun European modernity: the discovery of ‘the historicity of knowledge’. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the monogenetic assumption that humankind was of a single Adamitic origin, created by one God, and universally attending to one divinely ordained natural law, had already fallen into disrepute under the attack of Reason; once Reason too, along with its presumption of one ‘unchanging human nature’, was relativized after the European discoveries of different cultures and ancient civilizations, a new outlook on life, which Meinecke called historismus, ‘rose’ to change once and for all European culture’s very understanding of its world.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Charles Barbour

This paper is the first substantial investigation in English or German of the work and career of the student of Jacob Fries, leader of the Burschenschaften, educational reformer, and professor of philosophy and law Karl Hermann Scheidler. It examines Scheidler's interventions into political and constitutional debates during the German Vormärz and argues that he developed a unique brand of liberal corporatism that has been overlooked or misunderstood by intellectual historians—one that attempts to bridge the gap between eighteenth-century natural law and nineteenth-century political nationalism by defending the corporate autonomy of the churches and universities, and by promoting a combination of public virtue and moral perfection that he dubbed “political Protestantism.” It emphasizes Scheidler's polemical articles against the “Hegel school” and the “New Hegelians” in Rotteck's and Welcker's Staats-Lexikon. It proposes that a detailed examination of Scheidler's work provides a clearer understanding of how liberalism emerged as a distinct political ideology during the Vormärz and how one strand of German liberalism defined itself against Hegelianism.


Author(s):  
Roumaissa Moussaoui

Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights, is a gothic novel with an innovative stance. Gothic elements permeate the story, but it is not a gothic novel in the traditional sense of the word. The fantastic tales so popular in the eighteenth century alienated the reader by creating phantasmagorical worlds. Emily Bronte, however, grounded her gothic world firmly in reality. Through an analytical approach, the author aims to show, in this article, how Emily Bronte reversed gothic conventions to create a gothic reality whose message is still relevant today. The author will show that her use of the gothic mode was an attempt to capture the real essence of life, anticipating the metaphysical theories of D. H. Lawrence, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. By highlighting her innate understanding of human nature , this article will focus on her affinity with Lawrence and the celebration of man’s powerful primal instincts. This article hinges on the premise that she deplored the mechanical restrictions of the society in which she lived. The author aims to show that her Gothicism is, paradoxically, synonymous with a search for life.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roumaissa Moussaoui

Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights, is a gothic novel with an innovative stance. Gothic elements permeate the story, but it is not a gothic novel in the traditional sense of the word. The fantastic tales so popular in the eighteenth century alienated the reader by creating phantasmagorical worlds. Emily Bronte, however, grounded her gothic world firmly in reality. Through an analytical approach, the author aims to show, in this article, how Emily Bronte reversed gothic conventions to create a gothic reality whose message is still relevant today. The author will show that her use of the gothic mode was an attempt to capture the real essence of life, anticipating the metaphysical theories of D. H. Lawrence, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. By highlighting her innate understanding of human nature , this article will focus on her affinity with Lawrence and the celebration of man’s powerful primal instincts. This article hinges on the premise that she deplored the mechanical restrictions of the society in which she lived. The author aims to show that her Gothicism is, paradoxically, synonymous with a search for life.


Author(s):  
J.D. Ford

Pufendorf was the first university professor of the law of nature and nations. His De iure naturae et gentium (On the Law of Nature and Nations) (1672) and De officio hominis et civis iuxta legem naturalem (On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law) (1673) greatly influenced the handling of that subject in the eighteenth century. As a result Pufendorf has been recognized as an important figure in the development of the conception of international law as a body of norms commonly agreed to have universal validity by sovereign states. He regarded himself as an exponent of a new moral science founded by Hugo Grotius which transformed the natural law tradition by starting from identifiable traits of human nature rather than ideas about what human beings ought to be.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


2011 ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Galley ◽  
Eilidh Garrett ◽  
Ros Davies ◽  
Alice Reid

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative evidence of this phenomenon, but an analysis of the rich census and vital registration data for the Isle of Skye reveals that this practice was widespread, with over a third of eligible families recording same-name siblings. Our results suggest that further research should focus on regional variations in sibling name-sharing and the extent to which this northern pattern occurred in other parts of Britain.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


Author(s):  
William Weber

This chapter shows how selections from English operas composed between the 1730s and the 1790s—chiefly by Thomas Arne, Charles Dibdin, William Shield, and Stephen Storace—became standard repertory in concerts throughout the nineteenth century. Such pieces were performed at benefit concerts organized by individual musicians and at events given by local ensembles that blended songs with virtuoso pieces and orchestral numbers. Critical commentary on such songs justified their aesthetic legitimacy as groups separate from pieces deemed part of classical music. By 1900, songs by Arne, Storace, and even Dibdin were often sung in recitals along with German lieder and pieces from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Italy or France. The solidity of this tradition contributed to the revival of the operas themselves from the 1920s, most often Arne’s Artaxerxes (1762). This chapter is paired with Rutger Helmers’s “National and international canons of opera in tsarist Russia.”


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document