Mystical Songs of Bratslav Hasidim: Opening Notes

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-209
Author(s):  
Jonatan Meir
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Nahman Of Bratslav

AbstractOne of the distinctive literary genres of Bratslav Hasidism is the shir yedidot (Song of Endearment), a mystical poem concerning the stature of the soul of R. Naḥman of Bratslav. These poems, still sung by Hasidim today, contain esoteric traditions that reveal the multiple voices within Bratslav Hasidism. This article traces the development of this form from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the present, and argues that changes in emphasis within these songs reflect shifts in Bratslav theology over the years. The study thus presents a more complex historical picture of Bratslav Hasidism, which has usually been seen as one monolithic unit.

The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Institutional Status ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Historical Origins

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

scholarly journals Unlikely Documents? Exploring Finnish Nineteenth-Century Life Writing From Below

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB49-LWFB66
Author(s):  
Anna Kuismin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Rural People ◽  
Literary Genres

The expression unlikely documents in the title of this article is coined by Marlene Kadar and Jeanne Perreault. It refers to the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, texts that “bespeak either an extended or a limited story about a person’s life.” The article focuses on nineteenth-century Finnish life writing from below, texts produced by rural people with no formal education. The cases analysed include a notebook of hymns by a mistress of a farm, a chronicle penned by a modest country tailor, wooden boards inscribed by a saddle maker living on poor relief and textiles produced by a weaver woman. Seen in their contexts, these extraordinary texts prove to be understandable, even plausible: people who were not well-versed in literary genres and styles, had to make their choices from resources that were available there and then. In spite of the limited repertoire of models, the authors were able to express themselves and bring their subjectivity to the fore, in one way or another. Their texts can also be seen as tools of empowerment and vehicles of creativity for people in marginal positions at the time when writing did not belong to the life of the great majority.

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Sydney Owenson ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Italian Unification

The nineteenth-century Italian Risorgimento, or ‘resurgence’, re-drew Europe’s map to create a new nation-state: Italy. Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture argues that the Risorgimento radically shaped nineteenth-century British political, literary and cultural landscapes. Crossing borders, political divides and genres, this study examines the intersections of literary works by Mary Shelley, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Giovanni Ruffini, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others with journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain’s imaginative investment in this seismic geopolitical realignment. This book explores four political focal points of British engagement with Italian unification, moving between two crucial turning points that shaped Europe’s geopolitical map, the 1815 Congress of Vienna and 1861 creation of the Kingdom of Italy, to excavate the unsettling fusion of political optimism and disaffection produced through the collision of British and Italian politics and culture. British and Anglo-Italian responses to the Risorgimento reveal a complicated, decades-long print contest that played out across high literary modes, pamphlets and propaganda, memoirs and travelogues, parliamentary debates, journalism and emerging genres like sensation fiction. This study argues that forging a new state demands both making and unmaking; as the Risorgimento re-mapped Europe’s geopolitical reality, it also reframed how the British saw themselves, their politics and their place within Europe. These chapters demonstrate that the nation-building enterprise of Risorgimento culture was a participatory, international field crossing borders, print forms, political parties and literary genres, which played an invigorating role for British political discourse and print culture.

Zava Damdin’s Beautifying Ornament for the Mind of the Faithful: A Praise-Biography of My Root Lama Vajradhara, He Who Possesses the Three Types of Kindness, the Great Mahāpaṇḍita Endowed with Excellent Discipline and Learning Named “Sanjaa”

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Matthew W. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Summer ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Cultural Interface ◽  
The Mind

This chapter presents a unique devotional biography from Khalkha by Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) about his beloved guru Sanjaa (1837–1906). Completed in the late summer of 1914, some three years after the collapse of the Qing and the formation of a perilous Mongolian autonomous theocracy in 1911, Beautifying Ornament provides rare details about the life of an otherwise little-known Mongolian luminary from the late imperial period. Written in Tibetan and employing literary genres shared by that time across the Tibeto-Mongolian cultural interface, Beautifying Ornament sets narrative details proper to an “outer biography” (Tib. phyi rnam) into devotional verse (Tib. bstod) joined with a concluding “seven-limb prayer” liturgy directed to the departed Sanjaa for regular recitation by his disciples. Beautifying Ornament also illuminates the understudied globalisms of nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist life that sustained zones of contact and exchange between Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, Nepalese, Japanese, Russian, and Indian Buddhist communities, scholastic institutions, and pilgrimage sites.

Union and Presbyterian Ulster Scots

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between literature and union among Presbyterian writers in nineteenth-century Ulster. It examines the work of the poet William McComb and the journalist James McKnight, who together were responsible for the publication of The Repealer Repulsed (1841), a collection of reportage and literary fancy written in response to Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to repeal the 1800 Act of Union. Their various publications employed a shared Ulster–Scottish Presbyterian heritage to express opposition to the imposition of English Protestant forms and principles, and to highlight the importance and distinctiveness of Presbyterian Scots and Ulster-Scots within the United Kingdom. It demonstrates that Presbyterian writers saw Robert Burns as only one part of a broader literary culture that they shared with Britain and that was usually expressed in standard English, included prose as well as poetry, employed a number of literary genres, and sometimes drew upon a shared Gaelic heritage.

Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale

PMLA ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Cultural Anxiety ◽  
Reading History

Popular American tales of women's escapes from Roman Catholic convents were important manifestations of the virulent anti-Catholicism of the 1830s and 1850s. These stories also reveal how questions of evidence were imbricated with the woman question in nineteenth-century American culture. “Fictional” and “nonfictional” versions of these narratives attempt to prove their veracity, using a common standard of evidence and shared methods of authentication, documentation, and corroboration—including a reliance on their Protestant audience's reading history. Yet the multiple voices and forms and the visual, as well as verbal, rhetoric that the telling of the escaped nun's story entails work to destabilize feminine spiritual, religious, and moral authority. The escaped nun's intertextual story expresses and contains a cultural anxiety about young Protestant women and their influence in the remaking of American Protestant religious practices.

The Novel and the Stage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Russell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies the relationship between the novel and the stage. Novels and plays were the products of the same cultural, political, and social contexts: they were performed, circulated as texts, and interpreted in relation to and often in dialogue and competition with each other. However, the extent to which the development of the novel in this period interacts with that of the stage has received comparatively little attention in literary history. This partly reflects the differentiation of literary genres that took place in the nineteenth century and its subsequent academic institutionalization which has resulted in the novel and the drama constituting distinct fields within literary studies. This development was reinforced by the ‘rise’ of the novel to the status of a legitimate literary genre, one indeed regarded as central to modern global culture, and, conversely, the ‘decline’ of the prestige of theatre and drama, particularly that of the period 1750–1950.

scholarly journals Understanding the multiple voices of Islamic modernities: The case of Jihad

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86
Author(s):  
Dietrich Jung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systems Theory ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Multiple Modernities ◽  
Islamic Reform ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Global Modernity

In making a contribution to the debate on multiple modernities, this article addresses the growing fragmentation of contemporary interpretations of Islamic religious traditions. It argues that the polysemic nature of these interpretations mirrors to a certain extent the increasing functional differentiation of modern society. To substantiate this argument, the paper will first present a theoretical framework of global modernity that selectively draws on theories of multiple modernities, Modern Systems Theory, and of (post-)structuralist thinking. The empirical part of the paper takes the case of the Islamic institution of Jihad as its illustrative example. From a genealogical perspective, it analyses a number of steps of the (re-)interpretation of Islamic religious traditions from the classical period of pre-modern Islamic empires, via the Islamic reform movement of the nineteenth century, to the multiple voices of Islamic modernities in contemporary times.

scholarly journals Genres and Multilingual Contexts: The Translational Culture of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandrani Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
Multiple Languages

Nineteenth-century Calcutta has been widely researched to understand its role in the making of a ‘modern’ India. However, the ‘translational’ culture of this period has not received enough attention. The present article traces what it terms Calcutta’s ‘translational culture’ by examining a palimpsest of languages and genres through the mediating role of translation. Nineteenth-century was a time when several languages were competing for space in the making of modern Bengali prose. Most of the writers of the time were negotiating a plural and multilingual domain and experimenting withnew styles of prose and poetry writing. Two such examples can be seen in the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824 –1873), and Kaliprassana Singha (1841 -1870). These writers were instrumental in the making of new genres and were negotiating multiple languages and linguistic registers that included –Sanskrit, Bengali with its different elite and colloquial registers, English,and several European languages and literatures. In juxtaposing Dutt and Singha, the present article attempts to point towards a parallel history of the nineteenth-century Calcutta traced through moments of transactions, translations,and negotiations among languages, ideas,and world views. Languages and literary genres in this case become a testimony to the rich texture of social and cultural negotiations that went into the making of the modernist Bengali prose and indicative of its palimpsestic and translational nature.

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