Jane Talbot, a Novel

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
Stephen Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Political Liberalism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Social Betterment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Jane Talbot from the dominant reception of it as a failed novel and a capitulation to a gendered consumer market and political conservatism. Yet Jane Talbot deserves to be read not as expressing the rising interests of liberalism and imperialist nationalism but as critiquing their emergence, while also standing as a retrospective consideration of the flaws of 1790s Woldwinite claims for rational sentiment and progressive emulation as a mechanism for social betterment. Jane Talbot stands as one of the first American literary productions that self-consciously understands itself as a novel (rather than a “romance”) while also suggesting the limits to the novel form in a period of increasingly dominant economic and political liberalism.

Միջազգային հռչակի տեր բյուզանդագետն ու հայագետը

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
Aelita Dolukhanyan
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
State University ◽  
Scientific Heritage ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Basis ◽  
Euphrates Valley ◽  
The University

Nicholas Adonts (1871–1942) is one of the outstanding Armenian scholars who received an excellent education in Russia and Europe. During his studies at the University of St. Petersburg and later, when he improved his knowledge in well-known educational centers of Europe – in London, Paris, Vienna, Strasbourg and Munich, Adonts had the support of the great national benefactor Alexander Mantashiants. Eight volumes of Adonts’ works were published by Yerevan State University with the support of the Armenian branch of the Galust Gyulbenkian Foundation. Adonts left no autobiographical memories․ They would have been extremely interesting, since his life was really amazing. Tigran the Great (95–55 BC) was the most beloved historical figure of Adonts. He actually confirms that Tigran manifested himself as a world sovereign and enlightener, and his activities require new elucidation. Adonts presents the great deeds and military successes of the representatives of the princely house of Mamikonians in the Byzantine Empire. The study “The Fame of Bagratids” by Adonts is very interesting; it represents the branches of the Armenian royal house of Bagratids in Georgia, Caucasian Albania and Artsakh. In his extensive article “The Historical Basis and Ideological Value of the Novel David Bek”, the historian takes an exploratory approach while describing the historical events of the novel David Bek by Raffi. Especially rich is the heritage of the scientist in Byzantine studies, which has two branches of scientific and cognitive significance. Firstly, it presents important events of the history of Byzantium, and then the famous figures of this history, who were Armenians by nationality. In 1928 Adonts made a new discovery in Byzantine studies, exploring the “Historical basis of the Byzantine epic Digenis Acritas”. He proved that the epic poem was not Greek, since the homeland and place of activity of the main hero are the Euphrates valley, and his exploits take place in Western Armenia. Adonts was a devoted defendet of the Armenian Cause and dedicated many articles to this issue. Adonts left three monumental monographs as a legacy to science. These are: Armenia in the Era of Justinian (1908), Dionysius of Thrace and Armenian Commentators (1915) and the posthumously published Critical History of Armenia (1946). The scientific heritage of Adonts in the field of Byzantine studies and Armenology is rich with many scientific discoveries, whose value will be preserved forever.

Ormond; or, The Secret Witness

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-75
Author(s):  
Nicholas E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, The Secret Witness from its early reception as a formally flawed novel through more recent scholarship that reads the novel through the lenses of gender and sexuality, revolutionary politics, and the birth of Gothic fiction in America. However, by focusing on narratives of contagion and conspiracy in Ormond, this chapter also argues that scholars should embrace the novel’s transgressive form not as flawed but as a radical commentary on the possibility of political and biological indistinction. Set in a young nation besieged by pestilence and revolutionary ideals, Ormond invites readers to contemplate the impossibility of maintaining rigid physical (or ideational) boundaries in a transatlantic world bound together by bodies (and ideas) in perpetual contact.

Political Pamphlets

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-203
Author(s):  
Stephen Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Lost Work ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Pamphlets ◽  
Spontaneous Conversion

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s political pamphlets of 1803 and 1809 from the dominant reception of them as evidence of Brown’s so-called spontaneous conversion to political conservatism and bourgeois perspectives. The two 1803 pamphlets, on the question of American invasion of New Orleans to prevent Napoleon from acquiring it, need to be contextualized within the overall environment for politically progressive writers in the circum-Atlantic world in a period of revanchist conservatism. The 1809 Address to the Congress has a different tone and perspective. In the absence of an unexpected discovery of Brown’s lost work, a two-volume treatise on geography, the 1809 Address can stand as the closest, least rhetorically ambiguous account of Brown’s outlook on politics.

scholarly journals 'Something entirely new': A Critical History of An Béal Bocht, 1941–75

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Harris
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article reconstructs an early reception of Brian Ó Nualláin’s An Béal Bocht (1941) in which the novel was hailed as a breakthrough work that advanced the Irish-language prose tradition and promised to win new readers of Irish. The story of how this initial enthusiasm hardened into a critical diminishment of Ó Nualláin’s achievement as an obscure parody involves the author’s own efforts to associate the novel with Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, the dampening of the optimism which surrounded the Irish language in the 1940s, and the impact of Patrick C. Power’s translation, The Poor Mouth, on how An Béal Bocht was understood. By charting the evolution of An Béal Bocht’s reception history, this article furthers contemporary scholarship on the promise Ó Nualláin’s novel still holds for Irish-language prose.

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

Same Address, Different Doors: Post-Heritage Deconstruction of the Heritage Household in Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s and 2010s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fourth Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Episodes

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.

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