scholarly journals SUBLIME LOVE AND THE ETHICS OF EQUALITY IN A HOMOEROTIC NOVEL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: PRECIOUS MIRROR OF BOY ACTRESSES

NAN Nü ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Political Turmoil

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.

Resurrection

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Tolstoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, anger, and forgiveness, Resurrection is at the same time a panoramic description of social life in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting its author's outrage at the social injustices of the world in which he lived. This edition, which updates a classic translation, has explanatory notes and a substantial introduction based on the most recent scholarship in the field.

Rethinking the Print Object: Goethe and the Book of Everything

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Piper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Book History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Technological Capabilities ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Publishing Strategy ◽  
Opening Up

This essay combines a consideration of the two-decades-long publishing strategy of Goethe's last major prose work, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1808–29), with a reading of specific formal features unique to the final version of the novel. In doing so, it argues that Goethe's use of print and narrative work in concert to form what we might call a particular media imaginary–to reimagine the printed book not according to emerging nineteenth-century criteria of sovereignty, nationality, and permanence but instead according to values more in keeping with the technological capabilities of print media, such as transformation, diffusion, and connectivity. In his vigorous engagement with the material manifestations of his work as a key site of literary work, Goethe offers us an ideal place to explore the productive intersections that the disciplines of book history and literary history are opening up today. (AP)

ANNE BRONTË'S SHAMEFUL AGNES GREY

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Hallemeier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agnes Grey ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mystery Plays ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
Mind's Eye

In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban on religious theatrical representation was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about impersonation, performance, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation. But by mid-century, the turn towards medievalism in visual culture, antiquarianism in literary history, and the ‘popular’ in constitutional reform placed England’s pre-Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national theatrical literature. In this changing climate, how was England’s rich heritage of vernacular sacred drama to be understood? This book probes the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘incarnational art’—whether, after the Reformation, ‘presence’ was only to be conjured up in the mind’s eye by the act of reading, or whether drama could rightfully reclaim all the implications of ‘incarnation’ understood in the Christian tradition as ‘the word made flesh’. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the recovery of the medieval mystery plays and their subsequent impact on the national imagination. The second half of the book looks at the gradual relaxation of the ban on the performance of sacred drama and asks whether Christian theatre can ever be truly tragic, whether art perpetually reanimates or appropriates sacred ideas, and whether there is any place for sacramental thought in a post-Darwinian, industrial age.

scholarly journals ’n Groene in De Nieuwe Gids, Frederik van Eeden, De kleine Johannes en die ekologisme

Literator ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
W. Van Zyl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Success ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth

An ecologist in De Nieuwe Gids, Frederik van Eeden’s De kleine Johannes and ecologismThe famous late nineteenth-century Dutch literary rebels, the Tachtigers, chose a part of Frederik van Eeden's De kleine Johannes as the opening text for the first edition of their literary mouthpiece, De Nieuwe Gids. Closer analysis in this article shows, however, that the novel contradicts precisely those literary ideals it was supposed to embody. Much more than being an illustration of the Romantic poetics favoured by the movement, it tends to be a rather didactic defence of ecological ideals and a literary preview of ideas Van Eeden would later advocate much more outspokenly. In his so-called Walden Experiment, inspired by the views of the American ecologist Henry David Thoreau, he would even try to put these ideals into practice. This experiment did not bring about the social success Van Eeden hoped for, but in an ironical way it did fulfil a prophecy in De kleine Johannes: “Among people you will experience endless sorrow…”.

Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Urban Modernity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
American Literary History

Mark Storey, "Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism" (pp. 192––213) This essay intervenes in the critical debates surrounding nineteenth-century American regionalism, arguing that such debates have tended to ignore the possibility of a shared and trans-regional category of "rural fiction." Developing this notion, I suggest that literary representations of rural life in the late nineteenth century are a crucial and neglected way of understanding the geographically indiscrete transformations of urban-capitalist modernity. Further, by examining these transformations through the prism of rural fiction, we can challenge the urban-centric tendency of postbellum American literary history. Drawing on several writers who have been the focus of much of critics' attentions on regionalism (Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah orne Jewett in particular), this essay considers both the generic and thematic instabilities of rural fiction, arguing that these instabilities serve to encode and refract the social and cultural context from which this fiction emerges. Reading rural fiction against the background of the increasing similarities between geographically distinct areas of rural life, and reconsidering many of the works that we currently gather under the regionalist rubric as, instead, rural, a distinct perspective can be gained on the standardizing and flattening processes of modernity itself.

scholarly journals Madness in the Society: Analysis of ‘One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest’

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irine Maria Joy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Beat Generation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Culture

Sanity is what society projects it to be, and which isn't true always. Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stands against the institutionalised mental illness in hospitals. The novel can be analysed as a metaphor of nineteenth century America when asylums were a place where non-conformists of the society are sent to. Foucault's Madness and Civilization discusses these notions clearly along with the interconnected themes of power, insanity and rebellion. The patients in the asylum may seem insane, but the idea of insanity is often misinterpreted and misrepresented by the society Madness is connected to correction rather than sickness. Therefore, the techniques used to heal the illness are far more unethical. This paper is an observation of insanity or madness in the society. It also unravels the concept of ‘unreason’ by Foucault in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The social and historic reading of the whole text explores Anti-Conformism (Beat Generation) and Counter Culture Movement (Hippie-culture) in America i.e, Individual v/s Society.

scholarly journals In Memory of Herzen. On the Margins of the Magazine “Russkoye Bogatstvo”

Literary Fact ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 312-325
Author(s):  
Mikhail V. Stroganov
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Biographies ◽  
The 19Th Century

The paper examines the history of the phrase “in memory of Herzen”, which became the title of a number of journalistic and poetic works. The origin of this formula and the reasons for its transfer from the days of memory (anniversaries of death) to the birthdays of A.I. Herzen are found out. The study of this story allows determining the historical significance of the article by the founder of this tradition, A.G. Gornfeld, whose legacy has not yet received an adequate assessment in the literary history. In the course of the study, the author clarifies and refines the literary biographies of other authors who also used this formula: the practically unknown “populist” poet S. Ivanov-Raikov and the “social democratic” publicist N.N. Kuzmin. The reconstruction allows seeing the real role of the article “In Memory of Herzen” by V.I. Ulyanov-Lenin, the value of which in the 1940 –1970s was unlawfully exaggerated, as a result of which the historical perspective in the study of many literary phenomena and, first of all, the assessment of A.I. Herzen’s activities were distorted. All this leads to an adequate interpretation of N. Korzhavin's poem dedicated to the topic, which for many generations has been the ideological key to describing the place of A.I. Herzen in the social and literary movement of the 19th century. At the end of the paper, it is concluded that the historical, cultural and literary heritage acquires significance only in the context of modernity, but politics and journalism seek to unfold the legacy of the past in their specific pragmatic interests, and even history seeks to see a lesson in the past, although addressing it not to a particular group of people, but to the modernity as a whole. Literature does not have such pragmatic interests, but it attracts modern human with the charm of the personality of past centuries, and that’s what makes its irreplaceable significance.

Romancing the Interstitial

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-337
Author(s):  
Sheila Liming
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

Sheila Liming, “Romancing the Interstitial: Howe, Balzac, and Nineteenth-Century Legacies of Sexual Indeterminacy” (pp. 311–337) This essay links Julia Ward Howe’s infamous “lost” text, The Hermphrodite (first published in 2004), with Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), arguing that Howe rewrites Balzac’s figure of the “tragic hermaphrodite” with the intention of protesting nineteenth-century American assumptions regarding innate sexual difference. The Hermaphrodite tells the story of Laurence, a deeply contemplative, intelligent person whose sexual identity is disputed, but Howe never employs the term “hermaphrodite” outright. This situation encourages readers to judge Laurence’s hermaphroditism by his behavior and actions in the novel, not his biology, and this is furthermore consistent with the way the term “hermaphrodite” was used and understood by mid-nineteenth-century Americans. As such, this essay examines the claims that Howe makes about the social machinery of gender in The Hermaphrodite, arguing that while Laurence has much in common with Balzac’s Sarrasine, Howe uses her protagonist as a means of revising outdated arguments about biological “truth.” Howe’s Laurence revisits and updates nineteenth-century considerations of the aesthetic androgyne in the service of a modern, political agenda concerning sexual demarcation and difference.

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