Printing the Goddess: Intersections of Language, Place, Technology, and Agents of Transmission in Nepali Manuscript and Early Print Culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 114-153
Author(s):  
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mass Reproduction ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Print Cultures

Abstract In late nineteenth-century Nepal, the advent of print and mass reproduction marked a critical and as yet understudied junction in Nepal’s literary history and attendant manuscript and print cultures. This article employs Nepal’s popular Svasthānīvratakathā to illuminate key shifts and intersections between language of composition, technologies of writing, places of composition or reproduction, and the agents of transmission that are emblematic of local manuscript practices and paradigmatic of the emergent print culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nepal. The practices and actors involved in Svasthānī transmission shifted the text away from the private, domestic sphere to the public, translocal realm on multiple levels. Attending to these shifts as evidenced in one living devotional tradition indexes significant developments and intersections that deepen our knowledge of the changing linguistic, technological, geocultural, and socioeconomic aspects of the literary landscape in Nepal and South Asia more broadly.

Serial fictions: Urdu print culture and the novel in colonial South Asia

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Dubrow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
South Asian Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Open Nature

Serialisation allowed for remarkable experimentation with the new genre of the novel in colonial South Asia. The open nature of serialisation in South Asia, in which novels were not planned in advance but rather could develop and change while in progress, meant that serialised versions of novels were often more experimental than their later book editions. In this article, I use the pioneering Urdu novel Fasāna-e Āzād (1878–83) as a case study to examine serialisation’s effects on the emerging novel genre in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. By comparing the serial version and later book editions, I show that Fasāna-e Āzād underwent a fundamental transformation from serial to book, changing from a set of satirical sketches critical of Westernisation, to a pro-colonial novel. The protagonist Azad’s shift from a picaresque anti-hero to a proto-nationalist hero reflected the changing nature of respectability, what in Urdu was called sharafat, in the late nineteenth-century South Asia. Finally, I suggest that Fasāna-e Āzād’s evolution from serial to book anticipated the turn in South Asian literature from satire towards nationalist and prescriptive discourse, reflecting the broad movement from ideological and narratological openness to closedness in the twentieth century.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth

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.

Neanderthal and the fossilization of the Third World

2020 ◽  
pp. 030631272098346
Author(s):  
Ryan Higgitt1
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Third World ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Investment Bankers ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Third World

Neanderthal is the quintessential scientific Other. In the late nineteenth century gentlemen-scientists, including business magnates, investment bankers and lawmakers with interest in questions of human and human societal development, framed Europe’s Neanderthal and South Asia’s indigenous Negritos as close evolutionary kin. Simultaneously, they explained Neanderthal’s extinction as the consequence of an inherent backwardness in the face of fair-skinned, steadily-progressing newcomers to ancient Europe who behaved in ways associated with capitalism. This racialization and economization of Neanderthal helped bring meaning and actual legal reality to Negritos via the British Raj’s official ‘schedules of backward castes and tribes’. It also helped justify the Raj’s initiation of market-oriented reforms in order to break a developmental equilibrium deemed created when fair-skinned newcomers to ancient South Asia enslaved Negritos in an enduring caste system. Neanderthal was integral to the scientism behind the British construction of caste, and contributed to India’s becoming a principal ‘Third World’ target of Western structural adjustment policies as continuation of South Asia’s ‘evolution assistance’.

scholarly journals Debating Scientific Medicine: Homoeopathy and Allopathy in Late Nineteenth-century Medical Print in Bengal1

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinjini Das
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Medical Journals ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Print Market

AbstractThe historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical ‘mainstream’ for granted. This article argues that the idea of an ‘orthodox’, ‘mainstream’ named allopathy and one of its ‘alternatives’ homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed ‘fringe’, ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the ‘orthodoxy’ of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as ‘homoeopaths’ and ‘allopaths’ were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of ‘scientific’ medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories ‘allopathy’ and ‘homoeopathy’ in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed ‘debates’, as an essential contemporary trope in discussing ‘science’ in the vernacular.

Symbolism Overview

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emile Fromet de Rosnay ◽  
Dennis Ioffe ◽  
Samantha Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Broad Term ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Popular Language ◽  
Emile Nelligan

Symbolism is a late-nineteenth-century literary movement centred mostly around the work of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and the later Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as novelists like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edouard Dujardin. Although Tristan Corbière died in 1875, he is an important figure associated with the movement thanks to his image as a poète maudit (‘poet of the damned’) and to this poetic style. A broad term that occasionally extends to early twentieth-century modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, Symbolism is traditionally dated from circa 1870 to 1900. (The term ‘Symbolist’ was coined by Jean Moréas in the review La Vogue in 1886.) The movement became more international in the 1890s with the emergence of European Symbolism such as Russian Symbolism, German Symbolism etc., and with poets such as Emile Nelligan in Canada. Of equal importance is its influence as an artistic movement. Symbolism reacted to broader cultural tendencies related to scientific and literary Positivism such as Realism and Naturalism, and the language of the popular press, particularly as it appeared in the form of best-sellers. Where popular language informs the public with moral narratives, Symbolist language tries to avoid such a reduction.

scholarly journals IL SIGNIFICATO DEL BICENTENARIO. COME UNA CONCLUSIONE

2013 ◽  
pp. 175-178
Author(s):  
Giorgio Pestelli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Drama ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The meaning of the bicentenary that solemnizes Verdi and Wagner two hundred years after their birth essentially derives from the emotion of facing two personalities extraordinary for their creative energy and inventive continuity. In all fields of art and culture, the late Nineteenth century image is conditioned by their presence. Born the very same year, they both looked for and created by themselves the accomplishments that musicians of the previous generation already possessed when they were barely twenty years old. They reached almost at the same time both the revelation of their personality (Der fliegende Holländer 1841, Nabucco 1842), and the fullness of their artistic means (Rigoletto 1851, Der Rheingold 1853), before attaining the acme of their trajectory with the astonishing operosity of their final years.While the analogy of this parallel course is impressive, the individuality of their creative patrimony is no less strong. This dissimilarity – more than on aesthetic or dramaturgic reasons, such as the distinction between naif and sentimental, or between “melodrama” and “musical drama” – rests on the different environments where it took root, each of them with its own alternative ideas of bourgeois society, of relationship with the public, the contemporary theatre and literature: that’s why it is important today to engage to enlighten the cultural and social contexts in which the genius of the two masters developed.

scholarly journals The Meat City: urban space and provision in industrial Copenhagen, 1880–1914

Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.

The Oxford Handbook of Jack London

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Social Condition ◽  
Jack London ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Consumption ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman define modernism and modernity this way: “Modernity is a social condition. Modernism was a response to that condition.” Modernity “is an urban condition” “reached in certain parts of the world in the late nineteenth century … a mass phenomenon” characterized by the rise of technology, print culture, and material consumption. Jack London, who is routinely categorized as a naturalist and realist, can also be called a modernist. The word modern appears often in the pages of this handbook, and though it is not new to call London a modernist, the breadth of scholarship in this present volume gives the categorization new meaning. This isn’t to deny London’s status as a realist/naturalist but only a way to recognize he was much more than that. London called his era the Machine Age and created his role of political artist to respond to it. Thus the other emphasis in the handbook is on the intersection of his politics and his art. London was concerned with instigation and shock. He wasn’t a propagandist, he was a troublemaker. In both fiction and nonfiction—a binary he did not recognize—he exposed the fallacies of capitalist society. As both a nationally recognized public figure and a citizen of the world, he chose to instruct his audience in novels, short stories, essays, speeches, and newspaper reports. This handbook ultimately emphasizes the artist Jack London bringing change to the world.

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