Repurposing Romantic Drama in Late-Nineteenth-Century Egypt: Najīb al-Ḥaddād’s Arabizations of Victor Hugo

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 394-424
Author(s):  
Edward Ziter

Abstract At the end of the nineteenth century, Najīb al-Ḥaddād adapted two dramas by Victor Hugo for The Egyptian Patriotic Troupe. Al-Ḥaddād rewrote Hugo’s Hernani as Ḥamdān, transferring the story from the Spanish court of 1519 to Andalucía under ‘Abd al-Raḥmān II. Les Burgraves became Tha’rāt al-‘arab (Revenge of the Arabs), and transformed from a play about Barbarossa and the Holy Roman Empire into a play about a pre-Islamic Lakhmid king’s struggle to restore unified Arab rule in the Arabian peninsula. I argue that Al-Ḥaddād’s adaptations anachronistically placed modern ideas in the Arab past—characterizing shūrā as the election of leaders, using sha‘b to mean a sovereign people, and calling for Arab cultural unity and revival. Al-Ḥaddād’s adaptations transformed the nationalism of Hugo’s drama into calls for Arab solidarity. In producing these plays, The Egyptian Patriotic Troupe embodied an Arab past overlaid with modern communal identities.

1977 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 23-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Bullough

Jean Mabillon’s incidental treatment in his De re diplomatica of the lead bulla of an emperor Charles with the reverse legend Renovatio Roman. Imp. gives no inkling of the reputation it was to acquire in later historiography of the Carolingian empire. Mabillon himself favoured an attribution to Charles the Fat, although between the publication of the first and supplementary volumes of his epoch-making work it had been correctly attributed to the first Charles by the numismatist François Le Blanc. Without these early publications, modern discussion of early Carolingian imperial and renaissance ideology might have been deprived of one of its key texts: for the bull was already in a much damaged condition in the late-nineteenth century and both sides are now almost completely illegible. Its uniqueness, and the great rarity of the ‘imperial bust’ coins which are icono-graphically linked with it, invite us to consider whether the slogans and images of a ‘renewed Roman empire’ were known to more than a privileged few in Charlemagne’s lifetime: even so, if the Annales Mettenses, completed in 805, have been rightly interpreted, someone in the court circle had felt the need to appease critics by emphasising the strictly-Frankish roots of his imperial authority at the same time as the dies of the new coins were being prepared.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. BRINK-ROBY

This paper argues that, for a number of naturalists and lay commentators in the second half of the nineteenth century, evolutionary – especially Darwinian – theory gave new authority to mythical creatures. These writers drew on specific elements of evolutionary theory to assert the existence of mermaids, dragons and other fabulous beasts. But mythological creatures also performed a second, often contrapositive, argumentative function; commentators who rejected evolution regularly did so by dismissing these creatures. Such critics agreed that Darwin's theory legitimized the mythological animal, but they employed this legitimization to undermine the theory itself. The mermaid, in particular, was a focus of attention in this mytho-evolutionary debate, which ranged from the pages of Punch to the lecture halls of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Crossing social boundaries and taking advantage of a range of venues, this debate arose in response to the indeterminate challenge of evolutionary theory. In its discussions of mermaids and dragons, centaurs and satyrs, this discourse helped define that challenge, construing and constructing the meanings and implications of evolutionary theory in the decades following Darwin's publication.


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