The Romantic Work of Genius: Author, Nature, Nation, and the “Genial Criticism” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-310
Author(s):  
Scott Hess
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
New Models ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Abstract This essay explores how genius in the nineteenth century simultaneously constituted both individual and collective national identity, helping to produce new forms of liberal democratic nationalist culture. It offers a Latourian interpretation of genius in terms of the kind of social work and connections that the term enabled. Genius became associated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with author, nature, and nation in ways that grounded new models of literature and identity in the supposedly transcendental truth of nature and in specific landscapes as “sites of memory.” This discourse of genius played a keystone role in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s aesthetic and social criticism, or “genial criticism,” which exerted a deep influence on Anglophone culture. The essay concludes by assessing the overall cultural politics of genius in relation to various categories of identity, especially gender, and by suggesting how the “romantic work of genius” continues to operate and hold power in our (post)modern societies today.

Peak Pursuits

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Schaumann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Mountain Regions ◽  
The Andes ◽  
New Models ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Alps

European forays to mountain summits began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the search for plants and minerals and the study of geology and glaciers. Yet scientists were soon captivated by the enterprise of climbing itself, enthralled with the views and the prospect of “conquering” alpine summits. Inspired by Romantic notions of nature, early mountaineers idealized their endeavors as sublime experiences, all the while deliberately measuring what they saw. As increased leisure time and advances in infrastructure and equipment opened up once formidable mountain regions to those seeking adventure and sport, new models of masculinity emerged that were fraught with tensions. This book examines how written and artistic depictions of nineteenth-century exploration and mountaineering in the Andes, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada shaped cultural understandings of nature and wilderness in the Anthropocene.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Lamb

Fuller’s books about England’s religious past helped to stimulate an outpouring of historical writing. Peter Heylyn wrote about some of the same subjects as Fuller, and so did Gilbert Burnet, Edward Stillingfleet, John Strype, and Jeremy Collier. Burnet, who looked for models for his history of the English Reformation, was sarcastic about Fuller, partly because of the latter’s “odd way of writing.” Fuller’s work was not highly regarded in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge deeply admired him for his insights and praised him for his writing. Several nineteenth-century historians defended his work. His reputation has remained uncertain, despite fresh assessments in recent years. Coleridge was remarkably apt in his viewpoint. Fuller saw the broader significance of the events he described and was one of the most sensible scholars and writers of his time.

Suffering in Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).

The Politics of Chiefs and Commoners before the 1830s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raevin Jimenez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
State Level ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
African History ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Level Analysis

The field of pre-1830 South African history has been subject to periodic interrogations into conventional narratives, sources, and methods. The so-called mfecane debates of the 1980s and 1990s marked a radical departure from characterizations of warfare in the interior, generally regarded in earlier decades as stemming solely or mostly from the Zulu king Shaka. Efforts to reframe violence led to more thorough considerations of political elites and statecraft from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century but also contributed to new approaches to ethnicity, dependency, and to some extent gender. A new wave of historiographical critique in the 2010s shows the work of revision to be ongoing. The article considers the debates around the wars of the late precolonial period, including unresolved strands of inquiry, and argues for a move away from state-level analysis toward social histories of women and non-elites. Though it focuses on the 1760s through the 1830s, the article also presents examples highlighting the importance of recovering deeper temporal context for the South African interior.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

scholarly journals ‘A Most Select Gathering’. Mexican National Pilgrimages to Rome during the Papacy of Leo XIII

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 475
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Ramón Solans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Holy See

The objective of this article is to analyse Mexican national pilgrimages to Rome that took place during the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878–1903). These pilgrimages occurred in the context of a global Catholic mobilisation in support of the papacy, during the so-called Roman Question. This paper’s analysis of these pilgrimages draws from historiography about national pilgrimages, as well as studies on Catholic mobilisation in support of the pope in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is fundamentally based on primary sources of an official nature, such as reports and other printed documents produced on the occasion of the pilgrimage. The study’s primary conclusion is that national pilgrimages to Rome had a polysemic character since they brought together various religious and national identities. The pilgrimages contributed simultaneously to reinforcing the link between Catholicism and Mexican national identity and the global dimension of Catholicism and allegiance to the Holy See.

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