Marketing Views of Modernity, Evangelism and Print Specialization in the American Mission Press Catalogs (1884–1896)

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-354
Author(s):  
Hala Auji

Abstract Taking up an analysis of the materiality of the American Mission Press (AMP) bilingual catalogs printed from 1884 to 1896 in Ottoman Beirut, in this article I identify these booklets as publications that circulated among broad networks of books, journals and newspapers during the period of the Arab nahda. By examining these catalogs in terms of the wider historical significance of their materiality, specifically their organization, layout, typography and illustrations, in this essay I show how these booklets promoted the AMP and its mission’s entangled messages in an increasingly competitive publishing industry. On the one hand, the catalogs highlighted the AMP’s ‘western’ qualifications and strove to engage local readers’ interests in ‘modern’ culture, science and technology. On the other hand, these works marketed the mission’s universalist evangelical views. Thus, in this study I show how such ephemeral publications, when studied for their dynamic content, make evident nineteenth-century Arabic print commerce at work and also illustrate early examples of nascent advertising practices.

Transfers ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Frederike Felcht

In the nineteenth century, a significant change in the modern infrastructures of travel and communications took place. Hans Christian Andersen's (1805-1875) literary career reflected these developments. Social and geographical mobility influenced Andersen's aesthetic strategies and autobiographical concepts of identity. This article traces Andersen's movements toward success and investigates how concepts of identity are related to changes in the material world. The movements of the author and his texts set in motion processes of appropriation: on the one hand, Andersen's texts are evidence of the appropriation of ideas and the way they change by transgressing social spheres. On the other hand, his autobiographies and travelogues reflect how Andersen developed foreign markets by traveling and selling the story of a mobile life. Capturing foreign markets brought about translation and different appropriations of his texts, which the last part of this essay investigates.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
VALESKA HUBER

This article analyses the proceedings of eight International Sanitary Conferences which were convened between 1851 and 1894 to address the danger that cholera epidemics posed to Europe. These conferences are examined in the context of the intellectual and institutional changes in scientific medicine and in the light of the changing structure of internationalist endeavours that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article shows that the International Sanitary Conferences were as much spaces of co-operation as they were arenas where differences and boundaries between disciplines, nations, and cultures were defined. Furthermore, it seeks to shed light on a broader tension of the period. On the one hand, the fact that the world was growing together to an unprecedented extent due to new means of transportation enabled Europeans to establish and expand profitable commercial and colonial relations. On the other hand, this development increased the vulnerability of Europe – for example to the importation of diseases. The perception that the world was becoming increasingly interconnected was thus coupled with the need for controllable boundaries. The conferences attempted to find solutions as to how borders could be secured without resorting to traditional barriers; like semipermeable membranes they should be open for some kinds of communication but closed for others.


2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Petrilli

Abstract As she worked through the nineteenth century Victoria Welby elaborated a fascinating theory of translation based on her theory of sign and meaning, which she designated with the term significs. This means to say that, on the one hand, Welby’s theory of translation took account of the vastness and variety of the world of signs, therefore of the unbounded nature of translative-interpretive processes which cannot be limited to the mere transition from one language to another. The condition for interlingual translation in the human world is the larger context where translative processes converge with life processes and maybe push beyond in what would seem to be an unbounded cosmic dimension. On the other hand, that Welby should have related her translation theory to her theory of sign and meaning also implies that she founded her translation theory in a theory of value recognizing the inevitable importance of the latter when translating within a single language as much as across different languages in a plurilingual and intercultural world. Ultimately, in the properly human world, to translate means to interpret, that is, to translate transfiguring and transvaluating significance.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Belardi ◽  
Luca Martini ◽  
Valeria Menchetelli

The Rocca Paolina of Perugia. From a fortress of inaccessibility to a landmark of accessibilityBuilt in the Perugia acropolis in the mid-sixteenth century as a physical expression of the oppressive reprisal of Pope Paul III against the city’s seigniory of the Baglioni family, the Rocca Paolina has always been hated by the Perugia people who, on several occasions during the nineteenth century, did not hesitate to demolish it. The historical events of this fortified architecture are ambiguously linked with its iconographic value, oscillating around a balance in continuous evolution that sees it on the one hand as a fortress of inaccessibility and on the other hand as a flywheel of accessibility.


Author(s):  
Madhuri M. Yadlapati

This chapter explores several articulations of faith as the consciousness of humility or dependence, on the one hand, and belonging to a world of meaning, on the other hand. These two forms of experience together identify some defining sense of trust in the sacred. Thus, the chapter begins with a discussion of humility, as treated by several Christian mystics and ritually enacted by Muslims in the five pillars of faith. Next, it considers nineteenth-century Christian theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher's treatment of religious experience and Christian God-consciousness. Finally, the chapter deals with the experience of reconciliation, whether as promise or as realized, and considers in detail a South Indian Hindu puja, the Satyanarayana vrata, as a ritual and mythic enactment of belonging to a larger world.


Author(s):  
Floris Verhaart

The final chapter summarizes the findings of the preceding chapters and offers an epilogue on how the tension between different approaches to classical literature has parallels in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the debates described in the monograph between the ‘Dutch School’ (philologia) focusing on textual problems and the ‘French School’ (philosophia) focusing on moral issues had no clear winners. Rather they led, on the one hand, to a more technical and professional approach to the study of ancient texts and, on the other hand, to the continued popularity of classical ideas and models of moral virtue in the eighteenth century thanks to more accessible works of ‘popular’ scholarship.


Der Islam ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Reilly

AbstractLate-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources from the Homs and Hama region in Ottoman Syria present contrasting portrayals of Bedouins. Taken together, these sources offer conflicting perspectives with respect to relationships between peoples of the towns and the steppe. On the one hand, literary sources typically portray Bedouins as antitheses of urban life, as savage wanderers who lived outside the norms of propriety and who collectively posed a threat to the wellbeing and property of settled people and of travelers. But on the other hand, legal sources portray Bedouins variously as targets of exploitation or taxation by urban-based governments; or as partners with urban people in contractual undertakings; or as imperial subjects who, like any others, would seek justice in the urban Sharīʿa courts. The article explores these differing characterizations, and seeks to explain the multifarious realities that different sources convey. It concludes by suggesting that relationships between town and steppe were on their way to becoming more institutionalized in the last years of the eighteenth century. This development foreshadowed documented nineteenth-century trends in which urban civil norms and institutions became noticeable in the lives of Bedouins who lived in proximity to towns and urban centers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Brusotti

AbstractAfter discovering the short cosmological treatise L’éternité par les astres at the end of 1937, Benjamin ‘constellates’ the author, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, with Baudelaire and Nietzsche under the sign of eternal recurrence. From then on, eternal recurrence is given a central place in Benjamin’s analysis of modernity. Under many aspects his thoughts are rooted in the dramatic years in which they were developed: a conception of myth problematic in itself is misapplied to Nietzsche, the analogy with Blanqui’s cosmology leads to misunderstandings, and Benjamin does not grasp the connection between a task relevant for himself, the redemption of the past, and Zarathustra’s thought of eternal recurrence. Nevertheless, this constellation charged with tension is theoretically productive. Benjamin interprets the two faces of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in the context of his own theory of the structural change of experience in modernity. On the one hand, eternal recurrence is linked in multiple ways to the new forms of technical reproduction and compulsory repetition arising in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is assigned the task of compensating for an irretrievable loss. Is this compensation thoroughly illusory? Or does it contain a ‘motive of salvation’? Guided by these questions, the paper investigates the ‘polyphony’ of Benjamin’s remarks on Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence and their heuristic potential.


1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Israeli

In the process of opening up China, the French representatives, like their other Western counterparts, came into contact with the Chinese mandarins who represented a culture and world view that were almost totally foreign to them. Part of the daunting task of preservin their country's glory and pursuing its interests, was to try and comprehend the world they were attempting to engage. They arrived in China with an intellectual luggage replete with stereotypes and misconceptions about the Chinese, on the one hand, and on the other hand they were committed to their mission civilisatrice in China which was to help the Chinese save themselves from themselves.


1956 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Baer

This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document