“What Comes From Men and Women Dancing”

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fictional Representations

The epilogue connects tropes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews, dance, and modernization with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations. Popular works such as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dirty Dancing (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (1997), Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) reveal the continued efficacy of the mixed-sex dancing trope in fictional representations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. These works are often less didactic than nineteenth-century predecessors; they envision more opportunities for female agency and frequently end happily. Not only is the dance floor a flexible space, the dance trope is a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. In other words, the trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing charts the particularities of the Jewish “dance” with modern culture.

scholarly journals Modern Rape-Revenge Movies and Shelley’s The Cenci

k ta ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Sahar Jamshidian ◽  
Fazel Asadi Amjad
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Female Victim ◽  
Prometheus Unbound ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Face ◽  
Traditional Pattern ◽  
Second Wave

Viewing Shelley’s The Cenci from the political upheavals of the nineteenth century would limit one’s response to the play to the issues of that century. However, this play continues to be played in the twenty first century, which makes one wonder how a modern spectator with a feminist inclination might react to the theme of rape and revenge. The Cenci shares with a number of movies flourishing with the rise of the second wave feminism during the 1970s, the theme of a female victim transformed into a hero-avenger, who takes law into her own hands and avenges herself in the face of a dysfunctional legal state. As revisions of the archetypal narratives of violation-revenge-violation, these modern movies have been praised for depicting heroines who are no longer powerless, miserable and victimized, but strong enough to avenge themselves with impunity. Though The Cenci repeats the traditional pattern of violation-revenge-violation, it focuses on the corruption and irresponsibility of the patriarchal legal system as well as its reformation, which have been neglected by both mythical narratives and modern rape-revenge movies. By reading The Cenci along with William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” and Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” we examine how The Cenci challenges the modern rape-revenge movies and how Beatrice could have used her agency and her anger in a more effective way to fight against tyranny. 

Firearm “Rights” in Canada: Law and History in the Debates over Gun Control

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (01) ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
R. Blake Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article explains why and how some Canadians have asserted a right to possess firearms from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It demonstrates that several late-nineteenth-century politicians asserted a right to arms for self-defence purposes based on the English Bill of Rights. This “right” was forgotten until opponents of gun control dusted it off in the late twentieth century. Firearm owners began to assert such a right based upon the English Bill of Rights, William Blackstone, and the English common law. Their claims remained judicially untested until recent cases finally undermined such arguments.

scholarly journals Daniel Call’s Schocker: German Knittelvers in the late twentieth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
David Chisholm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Verse Forms ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The word “Knittelvers” has been used since the eighteenth century to describe four-stress rhyming couplets which seem to be rather simply and awkwardly constructed, and whose content is frequently comical, course, vulgar or obscene. Today German Knittelvers is perhaps best known from the works of Goethe and Schiller, as well as other late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.Well-known examples occur together with other verse forms in Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager, as well as in ballads and occasional poems by both poets. While literary critics have shown considerable interest in Knittelvers written from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, there has been almost no discussion of the further use and development of this verse form from the nineteenth century to the present, despite the fact that it continues to appear in both humorous and serious works by many contemporary German writers. This article focuses on an example of dramatic Knittelvers in a late twentieth century play, namely Daniel Call’s comedy Schocker, a modern parody of Goethe’s Faust. Among other things, Call’s play, as well as other examples of Knittelvers in works by twentieth and early twenty-first century poets, demonstrates that while this verse form has undergone some changes and variations, it still retains metrical characteristics which have remained constant since the fifteenth century. Today these four-stress couplets continue to function as a means of depicting comic, mock-heroic and tragicomic situations by means of parody, farce and burlesque satire.

scholarly journals Beyond belief : the crisis of faith in A.S. Byatt's fiction

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anne Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Natural Development ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Crisis Of Faith ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Norse Myth

A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarök (2011), a retelling of the Norse myth of the downfall of the gods and the end of the world, would seem to be a departure from her fictional narratives set in the nineteenth or twentieth century. However, this book is a natural development from her earlier novels that explored the Victorian crisis of faith resulting from the loss of religious certainty in the face of scientific discoveries. The author’s writing over the last twenty years has become increasingly involved with science, and she has long acknowledged her rejection of Christian beliefs. Byatt used the nineteenth century as a starting point for an exploration of twenty-first century concerns which have now resurfaced in the Norse myth of loss and destruction. This paper revisits "Possession" and "Angels and Insects" within the framework of her more recent writing, focusing on the themes of religion, spiritualism and science.

scholarly journals Aboriginal performance as war by other means in the nineteenth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 2-15
Author(s):  
Maryrose Casey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
First Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Indigenous Australian ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
The Face ◽  
Vast Range ◽  
Power Position

Commercial performances for entertainment are usually assumed to be lightweight, cultural activities that serve little or no serious purpose. Perhaps because of this typical perspective, prior to the mid-twentieth century, Indigenous Australian performances drawing on their cultural practices for entertainment are often styled as either the result of oppressive exploitation by colonisers or cultural tourism. However, an examination of Indigenous Australian initiated and controlled performances, for entertainment in the nineteenth century, reveals a more complicated picture. In Australia, across the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Aboriginal people and the colonisers actively fought for physical, psychological and emotional sovereignty of the land through thousands of performances for entertainment purposes. This might be expected given that Australian Aboriginal cultures are probably the most performance-based in the world—in the sense that explicit, choreographed performances were used for a vast range of social and cultural purposes from education, through to spiritual practices, arranging marriage alliances, to judicial and diplomatic functions. What might be less expected, considering the dominant power position, are the multiple ways in which the white audiences attempted to intrude, interrupt and inhabit these performances. The Aboriginal performers displayed their strength, vitality, high status and continued survival literally in the face of the colonisers and charged them a fee to observe. In response, white audiences both desired these performances and acted in ways to prevent them, often taking over the performance space and bringing events to a quick finish, while complaining that the show did not go on. The battle continued in white performances of Aboriginal practices and the ways in which Aboriginal performance was documented. In the twenty-first century, Aboriginal sportsmen who display their pride in their Aboriginality and opposition to racism continue to negotiate the same fight for space.

The global trauma of the nuclear age in Beckett’s post-war plays

2018 ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Mariko Hori Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Winter

In this chapter, Mariko Hori Tanaka focuses on how Beckett responds to the imagined nuclear winter inherent in the global competition in the production of nuclear bombs and energy during the Cold War years. Many of his post-war plays including Endgame and Happy Days are clearly set in a post-apocalyptic world, where the only human survivors are the onstage characters. The earth uninhabited and the landscape of ruins with the last remaining human beings barely alive are suggested in many of Beckett’s works. Our post-holocaust world is filled with repeated disasters such as wars, conflicts, and natural disasters, so that we endlessly feel a sense of apocalypse. Beckett’s sense of men and women living in worsening conditions towards the unseen ending is the global anxiety shared in the late twentieth to the twenty-first century. Beckett’s imagination of dead victims ruined and suffering in some traumatic event (which he never clarifies) reminds us, the audience and the readers, of those who suffered and died in apocalyptic disasters. This chapter thus deals with the recent cultural traumas globally shared in our age.

The Poverty of Posthumanism: Evolution and Extinction in Eugene Field's ‘Extinct Monsters’

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-197
Author(s):  
Peter Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Poetic Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Natural Histories

This article interrogates constructions of posthumanism in twenty-first century children's literature criticism and ecocriticism. Focusing on an unpublished manuscript by Eugene Field, it argues that the concept of species extinction undermines the theoretical usefulness of posthumanism. The paper begins by discussing the uses and shortcomings of posthumanism as a critical tool in children's literature. In doing so, it establishes connections with the challenge to the human posed by technology in the twenty-first century and the new understanding of what constitutes the human at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper documents intersections between Field's illustrated poem and contemporary representations of evolution and extinction circulating in popular and scientific natural histories. It is suggested that Field's text is also mediated by the visual traditions which framed contemporary natural history writing. Further, situating Field's poetry for children in a broader tradition of nineteenth-century American poetics committed to authorising the voice of the poet, it asks how this voice is complicated by the new realities of evolution and extinction. Confronted with these new realities, Field's manuscript traces the waning of poetic authority and, it is argued, thereby calls for a new aesthetics of children's literature in the face of extinction.

‘University’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
First Century ◽  
University Teachers ◽  
Sports Science ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Advanced Knowledge ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter addresses the need for a definition of ‘university’ in England. The lack of any comprehensive and consistent definition of a ‘university’ in the English tradition does not mean that trends and indications left no footprints. Certain norms have come and gone. Until the nineteenth century, there was no expectation that a university would be engaged in both teaching and ‘research’, though a level of advanced knowledge (‘scholarship’) was to be expected of university teachers. In its teaching, for many centuries, an English university offered a limited range of subjects. The expansion from the nineteenth century into scientific and ‘humanities’ studies — such as modern history and English language and literature and modern languages — led to in the late twentieth-century and twenty-first century, additions such as media studies and management studies and sports science.

The Politics of the Dance Floor: Culture and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

Slavic Review ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 802-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Nemes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
Invaluable Tool

The nineteenth-century Hungarian dance floor provides an invaluable tool for mapping the contours of both an emerging civil society and the political practices of Hungarian nationalism. During the 1840s, consciously “national” costumes, music, dances, and language became de rigueur in all areas of social life, and especially on die dance floor. Because associations and newspapers linked such cultural practices to opposition politics, these balls allowed a large number of men and women usually excluded from public life to display their patriotism and political allegiances. In this way, the diffuse set of ideas, feelings, and allegiances connected witii nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism spread more widely in Hungary. These developments did not occur without conflict, and an examination of debates surrounding the dance floor reveals widely divergent views on participation in civil society and the boundaries of the nation.

scholarly journals Blonda själar: Johan Runius, maskulinitet, nation och genre i litteraturhistorien

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 34-58
Author(s):  
Anna Cullhed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

‘Blond Souls’: Johan Runius, Masculinity, Nation and Genre in Literary HistoryThis paper shows that the historiographical accounts of Johan Runius (1679–1713) remain remarkably stable, from the early stages of national literary history of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, despite the radical theoretical shifts taking place during the period. The poet Runius is generally described as an occasional poet, a rhyme virtuoso, a good-tempered man, and as a precursor of the celebrated Carl Michael Bellman, considered a uniquely Swedish genius. These features are connected to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideals of masculinity and the nation. Whereas Runius in the early nineteenth century was described as childish, during the later nineteenth century his good temper was interpreted as an ideal, steadfast masculinity in the face of the hardships of early eighteenth-century Sweden. Further, the historiographical tradition set greater store by poems defined as lyrical. The hailed poems were, in fact, occasional poems, but they were recontextualised by the literary historians as proof of Runius’ personal feelings. The article ends with new suggestions for reading Runius beyond nation as the ordering principle of literary history.

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