Reading the Diatessaron with Ephrem: The Word and the Light, the Voice and the Star

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew R. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
John The Baptist ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Interpretation ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Continuous Narrative ◽  
Opening Section

Through a consideration of the reception history of the so-called “Diatessaron,” Tatian’s second-century gospel compilation, we can learn much about the nature of this peculiar text. Of paramount importance here is the Syriac Commentary on the Gospel attributed to Ephrem of Nisibis. In this article I argue that the ordering of pericopae in the opening section of Tatian’s gospel, which interweaves Matthean and Lukan passages within a broadly Johannine incluisio, prompts the Syriac exegete to an unexpected interpretation of these narratives. By reading these pericopae as a single, continuous narrative, he creatively combines the divine “Word” and “Light” of the Johannine prologue with the Synoptic traditions about John the Baptist as the “voice” and about the star that shone to guide the magi, presenting the star and the voice as extensions of the Son’s own agency. This remarkably original interpretation of the nativity of Jesus illustrates the degree of artistry that went into the making of Tatian’s text and the novel interpretations it elicited from its readers.

Nowhere Man

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-230
Author(s):  
Emily Frey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Hands On ◽  
History Of ◽  
Emotional Identification ◽  
Key Questions

Abstract In the opera that bears his name, Evgeny Onegin often seems remarkably inconsequential, a “superfluous man” among Russian society and nearly such in his own tale. Critics from Hermann Laroche to Catherine Clément have lamented not only the triviality of Evgeny's character but the flavorlessness of his music—a deficiency cast into relief by the compelling and pervasive musical presence of Tatiana, the too-eventual object of Evgeny's affections. This imbalance, a departure from Pushkin (whose Tatiana is ever sketchily drawn, and indeed almost mute), has often been attributed to Chaikovsky's well-publicized emotional identification with his heroine. Onegin's blankness thus becomes the product of a composerly flaw: Chaikovsky's inability to portray convincingly in music a character dissimilar to his own. But the Evgeny Onegin Chaikovsky inherited was not only Pushkin's. It was a cultural palimpsest, a text written on and written over by virtually every major intellectual figure in nineteenth-century Russia. By the time Chaikovsky got his hands on them, Pushkin's heroes were entangled in some of the century's most urgent debates: about the ethics of action versus reflection, the slippage between public and private identities. This article traces the constructions of Evgeny and Tatiana in a series of nineteenth- century readings of Evgeny Onegin, examining the ways in which the opera responds to and transforms key questions from the reception history of the novel. Among the texts considered are works by Herzen, Belinsky, and Dostoevsky, whose (in)famous “Pushkin Speech” was the opera's nearexact contemporary. From these readings, and the myriad images of Evgeny and Tatiana they present, emerge insights into a broader discourse about the nature of subjectivity in Europe's only autocracy.

From Immorality to Immortality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maaike Koffeman
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Branding Strategies ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of

This article analyses the publication history of Dutch translations of Madame Bovary within the wider context of Flaubert’s reception more generally. In the decades following its publication, Madame Bovary was widely criticized due to its ‘scandalous’ subject matter. Gradually, these moralistic views gave way to a growing recognition of the novel as a modern classic. However, the immorality scandal continued to resonate with readers. We investigate how these diverging views on the novel informed the branding strategies employed by the publishers of its Dutch translations. Combining reception history, translation studies, paratextual analysis, and cultural sociology, we demonstrate how each publisher established a branding narrative that was informed by the status of the translator in question and that targeted a specific readership.

scholarly journals Sara Jeannette Duncan’s “Canadian Editions”:

Authorship ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridgette Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Global Mobility ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This article examines the publishing conditions and reception history of Sara Jeannette Duncan’s satirical novel Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London (1908). It contends that Duncan’s understanding of her reading audiences, and the gendered expectations of a woman writing in the early twentieth century, allowed her to advance the novel genre in an English imperial literary market. Cousin Cinderella foregrounds the circulation of people and printed material and is interested in their reading and interpretation through the networked connections that empire engenders. Indeed, Duncan’s global mobility and her perspective on Canada as a rejuvenating racial and economic presence in an enlarged world led her to the type of generic experimentation discerned in Cousin Cinderella and to a lesser extent The Imperialist of 1904. In Cousin Cinderella, Duncan extends both novelistic romance and realism through the trope of female authorship and the novel’s allegorised character Mary Trent. Through Mary, Duncan features women in race-making and nation-making projects, where sentimental marriage functions allegorically for practical political and economic ends. And like Mary, Duncan considered herself attached to Canada, as she established success in a market dominated by male authors and metropolitan markets. This article on an understudied novel in Duncan’s oeuvre brings together a study of authorship, literary analysis, and cultural history to contextualise and elucidate Duncan’s path-breaking career.

The “Unspeakable Teachings” of The Secret Gospel of Mark: Feelings and Fantasies in the Making of Christian Histories

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-173
Author(s):  
Alexis G. Waller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gospel Of Mark ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Order ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of

A fragmentary text exhumed from the archives in 1958—or else fabricated that same year—is the fraught subject of this essay. Secret Mark has been embraced as the earliest surviving version of the Gospel of Mark and denounced as either a second-century forgery or a twentieth-century hoax. The stormy reception history of this controversial text—one that appears to represent a homoerotic encounter between Jesus and an unnamed young man—is an affective history of the first order, as the essay demonstrates. Approaching the scholarly and popular reception of Secret Mark as a queer archive of feelings (a là Ann Cvetkovich), the essay explores the ways in which historiographical protocols—even, or especially, in a discipline as austere and affect-challenged as biblical scholarship—act as both medium and cover for affective investments, and it reflects on how historians might better handle (their feelings about) the early Christian past, or, indeed, any past.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Opening Section

This volume examines the period from 1750–1820, which was a crucial period in the development of the novel in English. Not only was it the time of Smollett, Sterne, Austen, and Scott, but it also saw the establishment and definition of the novel as we know it, as well as the emergence of a number of subgenres, several of which remain to this day. Conventionally however, it has been one of the least studied areas—seen as a falling off from the heyday of Richardson and Fielding, or merely a prelude to the great Victorian novelists. This book takes full advantage of recent major advances in scholarly bibliography, new critical assessments, and the fresh availability of long-neglected fictional works, to offer a new mapping and appraisal. The opening section, as well as later chapters, consider historical conditions underlying the production, circulation, and reception of fiction during these seventy years, a period itself marked by a rapid growth in output and expansion in readership. Other chapters cover the principal forms, movements, and literary themes of the period, with individual contributions on the four major novelists (named above), seen in historical context, as well as others on adjacent fields such as the shorter tale, magazine fiction, children's literature, and drama. The volume also views the novel in the light of other major institutions of modern literary culture, including book reviewing and the reprint trade, all of which played a part in advancing a sense of the novel as a defining feature of the British cultural landscape. A focus on ‘global’ literature and imported fiction in two concluding chapters in turn reflects a broader concern for transitional literary studies in general.

Literary Unity and Reception History

2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-457
Author(s):  
C. Kavin Rowe
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
New Testament Studies ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Literary Unity

In the effort both to clarify and advance the present scholarly discussion, this article continues a conversation about (a) the reception history of Luke and Acts and (b) the hermeneutical implications that derive from such history . After a brief recapitulation of the status quaestionis, the article presses for a clear distinction between literary unity and reception history. It then moves to examine the cogency of the suppositions about the history of the Lukan writings prior to their reception in the second century (and beyond) and suggests a scenario that renders intelligible the later developments. Finally, the article concludes with some reflections about the pertinence of reception history to New Testament studies.

Writing Novels, Simulating Voices: Euphonia, Trilby, and the Technological Sounding of Identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-360
Author(s):  
Riley McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

This article troubles a tendency in literary criticism to equate novelistic speech with sound recording. It recovers the history of Joseph Faber's Euphonia (a speech simulator exhibited from the 1840s to the 1880s) in order to articulate an alternative vocal ontology of the novel—one of simulation rather than recording. The Euphonia has striking parallels to the eponymous heroine of George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894): their comparably mechanized utterances flatten hierarchies of difference, instead of phonographically using the voice to archive particularity. In dialogue, the Euphonia and Trilby elucidate the relationship between page and voice as always collaborative, though contoured by power.

scholarly journals 'Something entirely new': A Critical History of An Béal Bocht, 1941–75

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Harris
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Critical History ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article reconstructs an early reception of Brian Ó Nualláin’s An Béal Bocht (1941) in which the novel was hailed as a breakthrough work that advanced the Irish-language prose tradition and promised to win new readers of Irish. The story of how this initial enthusiasm hardened into a critical diminishment of Ó Nualláin’s achievement as an obscure parody involves the author’s own efforts to associate the novel with Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach, the dampening of the optimism which surrounded the Irish language in the 1940s, and the impact of Patrick C. Power’s translation, The Poor Mouth, on how An Béal Bocht was understood. By charting the evolution of An Béal Bocht’s reception history, this article furthers contemporary scholarship on the promise Ó Nualláin’s novel still holds for Irish-language prose.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

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