The Biology of Intimacy: Lamarckian Evolution and the Sentimental Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-484
Author(s):  
Kyla Schuller
Keyword(s):  
Population Regulation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Lamarckian Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Emotional Identification ◽  
Individual Body

Abstract This article explores the enabling intimacy between sentimentalism and biopolitics by turning to a less-than-obvious and yet characteristic example of the sentimental mode: the ubiquitous orphan tale of the mid- to late nineteenth century. It argues that individual orphan heroines of domestic plots not only function as tropes of domestic and national belonging, as has been widely recognized, but also of population regulation at the biological level of species. Sentimentalism functions as a mode of evolutionary theory, one that articulated the Lamarckian belief that sensory impressions shape the development of the individual body and of the species. Sentimental Lamarckism extended across literature, reform, and scientific theory and preceded naturalism’s deep engagement with evolutionary thought by decades. The sentimental orphan trope figures as a key aesthetic technology for regulating the growth of the population. Sentimental novels about orphans are not just about children who transform through their experiences; they were also directed at children readers and crafted to elicit emotional identification that could spur similar changes off the page.

scholarly journals Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 20190074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Beaumont
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sleep Problems ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

A late nineteenth century nonconformist renaissance

1977 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 351-360
Author(s):  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
Shadow Cast ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Total Disappearance

Let us start from the propositions that we need a new model of late nineteenth-century English nonconformist history, and that one might be found by making some use of the idea of ‘renaissance’, especially if one uses ‘renaissance’ to point to the emergence at a particular time of humanist attitudes. This new model needs to be both less anglican and less nonconformist than its predecessors. The anglican model of nineteenth-century nonconformity is obsessed with anglicanism, and the nonconformist model is equally obsessed with the behaviour of an earlier, largely unrelated evangelical protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both, in other words, are affected by shallow ideas of historical continuity. The individual nineteenth-century anglican often thought of nonconformity as the shadow cast by anglicanism; individual nonconformists believed that seventeenth-century independency had founded English political freedom, or that eighteenth-century non-anglicans had saved evangelical protestant truth from total disappearance. These were myths, however.

scholarly journals Yan Fu's Unfaithful Translation of Thomas Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics'

Linguaculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
Qi Yuhan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
National Crisis ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
Yan Fu ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Relationship

This paper analyses Yan Fu’s translation of the title and the key terms in Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and shows that his unfaithfulness was mainly due to his personal intention to inspire the Chinese people to fight against foreign enemies and the feudal system in late nineteenth-century China. In his famous The Heavenly Theory of Evolution, the translation of Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu added the traditional Chinese value of ‘heaven’ by translating ‘evolution’ as ‘heavenly evolution’ in order to make Darwin’s theory more acceptable and easier to understand by target readers. When he translated terms such as ‘competition’ and ‘natural selection’, Yan Fu borrowed the slogan of the Westernizing reform to explain the relationship linking evolution, competition and selection. Yan Fu wanted to arouse people’s attention to the theory of evolution and hoped they would use evolutionary thought as a theoretical weapon to save themselves and the country from a national crisis. His unfaithful translation appealed to the scholars to make them spread the theory through their social influence.

scholarly journals Reading Charles Beitz: twenty-five years of Political Theory and International Relations

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Rengger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

The last thirty years has seen the growth – or, as I should prefer to say, rebirth – of a field of inquiry that for much of the twentieth century was quiescent. That field would now routinely be called international political theory, in part to distinguish it from both political theory in general and International Relations (IR) theory in general, though of course, there are overlaps with both. Roughly speaking that field consists in ethical, historical and philosophical reflection on the manner and matter of international politics. There is a rich body of such inquiries in intellectual history (and not just in Europe) but for a variety of historical and intellectual reasons such inquiries had fallen out of fashion by the late nineteenth century. This situation was reinforced by the simultaneous evolution of the individual disciplines of political science and IR, and in particular by the rise of methodological and epistemological claims in both largely inimical to those earlier sorts of inquiry. Thus, as the story is widely told, ‘political theory’ and ‘IR’, as academic inquiries, followed largely independent paths for most of the twentieth century.

Abraham Dweck Hakohen (Khalousi): The Last Ḥakham Bashi Born in Aleppo

2015 ◽  
pp. 112-143
Author(s):  
Yaron Harel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Steering Committee ◽  
Community Leadership ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Clear Goal

This chapter details the transformations that took place in the Jewish community of Aleppo during the final decade of the nineteenth century and the controversy over the removal of Rabbi Abraham Dweck Hakohen from his office as ḥakham bashi. Socio-economic transformations in late nineteenth-century Aleppo, including the emergence of a prosperous and educated middle class and the decline of the class of wealthy householders upon which the institution of the rabbinate had relied for many generations, created an urgent need for a comprehensive reorganization of community leadership and institutions. The ascent of new forces within society, the distress of the weaker classes, and the decline in influence of those families who had constituted the old leadership all led to unrest throughout the Jewish public and a widespread desire for participation in running the affairs of the community. In practice, then, the deposing of the ḥakham bashi served a clear goal: to limit the power of the individual holding that office and to transfer some of it into the hands of the steering committee. This being so, the removal from office of Rabbi Abraham Dweck Hakohen can be seen as representing a revolution in the order of communal leadership, not merely the result of intrigue and conspiracy based upon personal hostility.

From “rooted out” to “rootless”: Images of Emigration in Lithuanian Drama

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Rūta Mažeikienė
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Native Soil ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Fragmented Identity

Since the early 1990s, when the Iron Curtain was lifted after over fifty years of Soviet occupation, approximately 800 000 citizens of Lithuania have emigrated, leaving a population of less than three million. This article addresses the phe- nomenon of emigration from Lithuania and analyzes how the issue of emigration and the experiences of the emigrants are reflected in Lithuanian drama. In the first part of the article, two plays – Without Conscience (Be sumnenės arba kaip ant svieto einasi) by Antanas Turskis and America in the Bathhouse (Amerika pirtyje) by Keturakis – will be analysed focusing on how the late nineteenth century plays shaped a critical attitude towards emigration, deconstructed the myth of the foreign land of gold and proposed a romantic image of the motherland as one’s native soil where one needs to return. The second part of the article analyses the plays Goodbye, My Love (Antoškos Kartoškos) by Marius Macevičius and Expulsion (Išvarymas) by Marius Ivaškevičius and points out how reflection on the contemporary experience of emigration helps to explore deeper problems of post-Soviet society and the individual such as a sense of placelessness and fragmented identity. A comparative analysis of these texts makes it possible to analyse the dynamics of the different conceptions of emigration, emigrant’s identity and self-perception as well as their artistic representations.

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