Stealing Words, Transplanting Images

2018 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Yu-jen Liu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Victoria And Albert Museum

Abstract This article explores how the category “Chinese art” was articulated and consolidated in the early twentieth century by focusing on Stephen Bushell's Chinese Art, the first book in English defined in terms of this category. Bushell's monograph highlights the intercultural character of the category, which was transformed in its content and cultural significance, when ostensibly the same authentic knowledge, articulated in verbal and visual representations, was moved from China to Europe and back again. The article starts by examining how Bushell's insider knowledge of Chinese art was transformed to fit the institutional setting of the Victoria and Albert Museum. It then explores how the authoritative knowledge of Chinese art communicated in Bushell's book was appropriated in China by the journal Guocui xuebao 國粹學報 (Journal of National Essence) in the context of attempts to revive national culture. Both cases involved hitherto unnoticed repetitions of text and images. By analyzing the mechanism informing these repetitions, this article reveals the entangled history behind the distinctive articulations of “Chinese art” in Britain and in China. Moreover, the analysis shows how the same elements, whether words or pictures, acquired a substantially different significance as they moved between cultures. This is exemplified by the formulation of the newly emergent classifying category Zhongguo meishupin 中國美術品 (“Chinese art objects”) in Guocui xuebao.

Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

The Muscovite Revival, 1881–1917

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard S. Wortman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Catastrophic Events ◽  
The West ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
United Nation

The assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881 ended the European myth of Russian monarchy—the narratives and imagery that had elevated Russian rulers since the reign of Peter I as exemplars of Western absolutism—and was followed by the introduction of a new governing myth idealizing seventeenth-century Muscovy. This chapter demonstrates that, by entertaining the illusion of a monarchical early Rus’, Alexander III and Nicholas II not only undermined the supra-national culture of their multi-national empire, but isolated themselves from educated society, both liberal and conservative, that looked towards political participation and the formation of a united nation-state on the model of the West. The catastrophic events of early twentieth-century Russia resulted not from a decrepit monarchy collapsing before insurgent oppositional movements, but from the clash of a monarch seeking to restore divinely inspired authoritarian rule with a Russia awakening politically and demanding to be heard.

Electricity Comes to the Countryside: Visual Representations of a Connected Countryside in the Early Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 50-66
Author(s):  
Rosemary Shirley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Development Agency ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Extensive Range ◽  
Visual Propaganda ◽  
Rural Places ◽  
Visual Cultures

In this chapter, Rosemary Shirley analyses an extensive range of visual propaganda, diagrams and informational drawings from the British Electrical Development Agency (BEDA) published during the interwar years, advancing a reading of the English countryside as a place of networked inter-connection, rather than the more usual characterisation of remoteness and isolation. Materials focussing on rural electrificiation are particularly instructive for studies of rural modernity because they are relatively rare examples of material designed to communicate ideas about the countryside and modernity to the people who lived and worked in rural places. Through analysis of BEDA’s facinating contribution to the visual cultures of rural modernity, this chapter aims to complicate received ideas of the rural as a victim of modernity, building instead an understanding of the English countryside and its inhabitants as active agents in processes which continue to shape our understanding of what it means to be rural.

Revelation and Validation

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-203
Author(s):  
Petra Ten Doeschate-Chu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Far Eastern

This article is about Matisse’s interest in Japanese and Chinese art, two artistic traditions that had a significant impact on his artistic thinking at the beginning and the end of his career, respectively. It analyzes the importance of Far-Eastern art and theory for Matisse’s modernism against the backdrop of the transformation (and ultimate decline) of Japonisme in the early twentieth century and the attendant revival of interest in Chinese art.


The End of the Line? the Fracturing of Authoritative Tibbi Knowledge in Twentieth-Century India

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Attewell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Pulse Diagnosis ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Family Practitioners ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Family Based ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This article examines the fissures that emerged between different forms of unani knowledge during the twentieth century in India and, specifically, the disjuncture between unani knowledge derived through institutional training and that gained by apprenticeship to established family practitioners. The first section sketches historically the modes of acquiring knowledge in tibb— through apprenticeship, institutional training, and self-tuition. Discussing the formation of unani institutions in the early twentieth century provides a foundation to explore the locus of authoritative knowledge and practice in tibb and a key to appreciating the kind of knowledge patients and unani practitioners alike consider reliable and genuine. The second section is intended as a counterpoint to this historical discussion. It reports on various forms of contemporary unani practice, mostly within family-based settings. This part highlights the fragility of forms of knowledge that are not a significant part of the curriculum within the network of government-funded and private unani teaching institutions in India. Three distinctive modes of practice in tibb serve as examples: urine diagnosis, pulse diagnosis, and the preparation of medicines.

“Defend Your Manhood and Womanhood Rights”

2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-194
Author(s):  
Modupe Labode
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Municipal Election

This article analyzes African Americans’ protest against the movie The Birth of a Nation in Denver in 1915 and the protest’s impact on the May 1916 municipal election, in which African Americans shifted their support from the Republican to the Democratic mayoral candidate. This essay contributes to the scholarship on African American activism during “the long civil rights movement” and the role of the idea of respectability in that activism. This essay first argues that protests against this film had political as well as cultural significance. African Americans’ political activism in the West furthers our knowledge of black activism in the early twentieth century. Finally, this essay contributes to understanding the local roots of African Americans’ shift from the Republican to the Democratic Party during the early twentieth century.

Images of deviance: visual representations of mental defectives in early twentieth-century medical texts

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
School Age ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
Children's Hospital ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Children’S Hospital ◽  
Mental Defectives

In his Feeblemindedness in Children of School-Age, first published in 1911, Charles Paget Lapage, physician to the Manchester Children's Hospital, wrote that one ‘only has to watch a group of feebleminded children to see that most of them have some peculiarity’. These words appear towards the end of an extensive discussion of the physical characteristics that could be found in feeble-minded children and are accompanied by a plate comprising four photographs of ‘Feebleminded Children showing Defective Expression’ (Figure 1).

Roger Fry, Chinese Art and The Burlington Magazine

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Parfect
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Language Discourse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Textual Strategies ◽  
Western Historiography

The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs was founded in 1903 by a group of art theorists, scholars and historians that included Roger Fry, later a co-editor of the magazine for almost ten years (1909-1919). On Fry’s death in 1934, the magazine itself described him as ‘the man who in the past did most to establish it and mould its character’. Part of this character was a consistent attention to Chinese art that he shared with fellow Bloomsbury writers, artists and intellectuals. This chapter illuminates Fry’s practice as a theorist and an editor interested in the arts of China by examining how these were represented and discussed in the Burlington Magazine under his auspices. It focuses especially on the kinds of language, discourse and textual strategies of sinophile contributors such as Arthur Waley, Lawrence Binyon, Perceval Yetts and R.L. Hobson. The chapter locates their approaches to Chinese art within a longer-term Western historiography of China and its culture(s), as well as within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century discourses such as aestheticism, scientism and orientalism. It thus attempts to unpack the ideological implications of the ‘connoisseurship’ professed by the magazine’s title as applied to the subject of Chinese art.

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