The Armature of the American Novel: The Antebellum Sketch and Tale in Literary History

2016 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-191
Author(s):  
Lydia G. Fash
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Printing Technology ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Market

This essay calls attention to the genre of the sketch, which played a critical role in the early nineteenth-century US literary market. Later when developments in printing technology made it easier to publish longer works, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe used the sketch as the basis for hugely important mid-century novels.

Harmonious Investigators of Nature: Music and the Persona of the German Naturforscher in the Nineteenth Century

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myles Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Choral Society ◽  
Scientific Identity ◽  
German Association

ArgumentDuring the early nineteenth century, the German Association of Investigators of Nature and Physicians (Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte) drew upon the cultural resource of choral-society songs as a way to promote male camaraderie and intellectual collaboration. Investigators of nature and physicians wished to forge a unified, scientific identity in the absence of a national one, and music played a critical role in its establishment. During the 1820s and 30s, Liedertafel and folk songs formed a crucial component of their annual meetings. The lyrics of these tunes, whose melodies were famous folk songs, were rewritten to reflect the lives of investigators of nature and physicians. Indeed, the singing of these Liedertafel songs played an important part in the cultivation of the Naturforschers’ persona well into the twentieth century.

The Soviet Project of the 1930s to Found a “World Literature” and British Literary Internationalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-425
Author(s):  
Katerina Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Network ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Georg Lukács

Abstract A major lacuna in Pascale Casanova’s account of world literature in her World Republic of Letters is the Soviet venture into establishing a “world literature” (mirovaia literatura) to be centered not in Paris but in Moscow. This aim was most actively pursued between the wars, when many writers were implicated in its international network. This moment in literary history provides a missing link in the progression from the more elitist world literature as conceived by Goethe and others in the early nineteenth century to world literature in our postcolonialist present and era of globalization. This article outlines the networks that sought to foster such a world literature and the main aesthetic controversies within the movement. In particular, the article looks at the efforts of such official spokesmen as Andrei Zhdanov, Karl Radek, and Georg Lukács to proscribe “bourgeois” modernism. It takes members of the British Writers’ International and their associated journals the Left Review and New Writing as case studies in the interplay between Moscow as putative “metropole” and the “periphery.”

scholarly journals Ghost Writers: Radcliffiana and the Russian Gothic Wave

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-171
Author(s):  
Katherine Bowers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Russian Translation ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Insight Into

Ann Radcliffe’s novels were extremely popular in early nineteenth-century Russia. Publication of her work in Russian translation propelled the so-called gothic wave of 1800-10. Yet, many of the works Radcliffe was known for in Russia were not written by her; rather, they were works by others that were attributed to Radcliffe. This article traces the publication and translation histories of Radcliffiana on the Russian book market of 1800-20. Building on JoEllen DeLucia’s concept of a “corporate Radcliffe” in the anglophone world, this article proposes a Russian corporate Radcliffe. Identifying, classifying, and analysing the provenance of Russian corporate Radcliffe works reveals insight into the transnational circulation of texts and the role of copyright law within it, the nature of the early nineteenth-century Russian book market, the rise of popular reading and advertising in Russia, and the gendered nature of critical discourse at this time. The Russian corporate Radcliffe assures the legacy and influence of Radcliffe in later Russian literature and culture, although a Radcliffe that represents much more than just the English author. Exploring the Russian corporate Radcliffe expands our understanding of early nineteenth-century Russian literary history through specific case studies that demonstrate the significant role played by both women writers and translation, an aspect of this history that is often overlooked.

The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
David Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes the rediscovery and reinvention of the ballad in the 1760s and 1770s, tracing the later impact of the resultant conception of the Middle Ages on nineteenth-century literature and scholarship. The chapter traces the way in which a notion of the ‘Gothic’ was differentiated, in the early nineteenth century, from the ‘medieval’ (a word newly coined around 1817) and goes on to look at the way in which the early beginnings of English literary history resulted from the antiquarian researches of the eighteenth century. It concludes with reflections on the extent to which it can be said there was truly a revival of the ballad, and posits that there was instead a revaluation something already there, with a new conferral of prestige.

scholarly journals From specimens to commodities: the London nursery trade and the introduction of exotic plants in the early nineteenth century*

2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (262) ◽  
pp. 715-733
Author(s):  
Keith Alcorn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Exotic Plants ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract Nursery owners played a critical role in transforming imported plants and trees from scientific specimens into commodities that became widespread in British gardens in the first half of the nineteenth century. This article uses rare surviving business records of London nurserymen to investigate the scale and structure of the nursery trade and its business practices between 1800 and 1850 and how nursery businesses innovated to meet the needs of an emerging middle class.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

2021 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
SJ Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Martin Delany ◽  
Military Uniform ◽  
The Military

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

“She Must Be a Rare One”: Aspasia, Corinne, and the Improvisatrice Tradition

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Ianetta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Rhetorical Instruction ◽  
Foreign Woman

Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction.

Sentimental Catechism: Archbishop James Gibbons, Mass-Print Culture, and American Literary History

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-119
Author(s):  
James Emmett Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Society ◽  
Gender Paradoxes

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) andClarissa(1747-1748) to Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol(1843) andLittle Dorrit(1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.

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