The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Lord Byron and Lady Byron

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
The World ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of

An overlooked aspect of Lord Byron’s short unhappy marriage to Annabella Milbanke remains the “singular,” everyday world of relation that marriage represented for him, both beforehand, when marriage was an abstraction performed in correspondence with Milbanke, and afterwards, when the Byron marriage and the world it figured was literally a history of missed opportunities that the poet recaptured and reinscribed in Don Juan. The finite, epistolary conversation that constituted the Byron courtship was more than a trial run at marriage, particularly as the opposite of what Byron disparagingly called “love.” It proved a stay against a future that, on the relational front and in Byron’s contemporaneous Eastern Tales, was devoid of either hope or possibility. Here, in the sway of anticipatory nostalgia, marriage day after day would be suddenly fathomable and as valuable as the monetary fortune Byron also sought, but as a history of missed opportunities.

Moments of Being and the Everyday

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This chapter examines the most convincing affinities in terms of Woolf and Heidegger’s understandings of Being-in-the-world. Drawing attention to Woolf and Heidegger’s respective notions of ‘moments of Being’ and ‘moments of vision’, the ways in which such moments are triggered by particular moods that are experienced by the individual are discussed. Disrupting the individual’s everyday inauthentic immersion in the preoccupations and prescriptions of the present, such moments provide the potential for the disclosure of the typically concealed extraordinary nature of the ordinary. This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance and history of the literary epiphany, and draws attention to the influence of precursors such as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and William Wordsworth upon Woolf’s writings. In the second section, attention is directed to a number of Heideggerian notions – including ‘anxiety’, ‘nothingness’, ‘boredom’, ‘wonder’ and the ‘numinous’ – in terms of their relations to the Woolfian ‘moment’.

Aleksandr Sumarokov's Elegit liubovnye and the Development of Verse Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Vroon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Lyric Sequence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lyric Sequences

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.

The Wearing of the Red: The Redcoat and the British Brand

Costume ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Arch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

As a concept, the idea of product branding offers insights into the history of uniform in Britain. The creation of a brand, by which a product is understood and recognised by its name, fits the cultural history of the red coat, that part of his uniform by which the British infantryman was known for over three hundred years. While the earliest references to the redcoat in this context occur in the sixteenth century, it is really from the eighteenth century onwards that the term becomes widely employed to denote the soldier. However, a review of royal portraiture in Britain from the late seventeenth century onwards also reveals that monarchs used the red coat as a way of uniting the ideals of patriotism with the monarch — a device that was particularly important for the Hanoverian dynasty. Both literature and the visual arts helped identify the red coat as a synonym for the soldier. Numerous references may be adduced, from Jane Austen writing of polite society, to Rudyard Kipling's Tommy. Lady Elizabeth Butler was perhaps the most famous artist to depict red-coated heroes in battles, which marked the defence or development of the Empire.

Wordsworth’s Double Take

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Second Look ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dorothy Wordsworth ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
Daily Writing

It is a characteristic, and a representative, feature of Wordsworth’s poetry as a period-bound discourse that the material opportunities it misses—or that often evanesce in his writing—are recoverable and acutely palpable as a result of being missed or misrepresented in a history of missed opportunities. In such a history the claim to historicity, which is typically subsumed in a movement from seeing to imagining, or from the particular to the universal, is reversed in a double take, where historical distance, however brief, allows for a second look. In this second look, “things of every day” emerge in ways that are striking and depersonalized in contrast to both conventional poetic practice and, as it turns out, the daily writing of Dorothy Wordsworth (the poet’s sister), which lacks historical perspective and where the everyday is seemingly everywhere and nowhere.

Mental Hospital Depopulation in Canada: Patient Perspectives

1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 386-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Herman ◽  
Colin M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Mental Hospital ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Symbolic Interactionist ◽  
Eastern Canada ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Living Skills ◽  
Institutionalized Patients

This paper reviews briefly the history of mental health depopulation in Canada over the past 30 years. The term “deinstitutionalization” is often used but is unsatisfactory. Using an exploratory, qualitative, methodological approach, data were collected on the problems encountered by a disproportionate, stratified random sample of 139 formerly institutionalized patients living in various geographical locales in Eastern Canada. Adopting a symbolic interactionist theoretical approach, this study, in an effort to fill a neglect in the literature, attempted to discover what the everyday world(s) of Canadian ex-mental patients was really like. Problems encountered related to stigma, poor housing, lack of back living skills, poverty, unemployment and aftercare. Quotations from patients are provided to illustrate such themes. The findings are discussed.

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