The Private Sublime in Public Discourse: War Poetry of the American Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 140-159
Author(s):  
John Richardson

This essay examines how poetry of the American Revolution contributed to the broader tradition of Anglophone war poetry through the “private sublime,” which would start as a minor and relatively unknown development, but eventually become one of the primary modes of depicting war, both in the later eighteenth century and the present day. It focuses specifically on two poets who formulated the private sublime: Freneau in the 1781 British Prison-Ship and Ann Eliza Bleecker in the poems that she wrote after her daughter’s death in 1777. While Freneau’s poetry emphasizes terror and beauty, Bleecker fashions a private sublime by aligning her own suffering with that of war combatants. This essay then turns briefly to Charlotte Smith, who depicts distant war via her own intense and highly aestheticized emotions. As Smith demonstrates, then, the private sublime emerged in the poetry of authors with direct experience of war in America, but was later adapted by a wide range of authors who experienced war at a far greater distance.

Author(s):  
Gary L. Steward

This work explores the patriot clergymen’s arguments for the legitimacy of political resistance to the British in the early stages of the American Revolution. It reconstructs the historical and theological background of the colonial clergymen, showing the continued impact that Stuart absolutism and Reformed resistance theory had on their political theology. As a corrective to previous scholarship, this work argues that the American clergymen’s rationale for political resistance in the eighteenth century developed in general continuity with a broad strand of Protestant thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The arguments of Jonathan Mayhew and John Witherspoon are highlighted, along with a wide range of Whig clergyman on both sides of the Atlantic. The agreement that many British clergymen had with their colonial counterparts challenges the view that the American Revolution emerged from distinctly American modes of thought.


2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. Johnson

For most cultures and most of human history, the death penalty was taken for granted and directed at a wide range of offenders. In ancient Israel, death was prescribed for everything from murder and magic to blasphemy, bestiality, and cursing one's parents. In eighteenth-century Britain, more than 200 crimes were punishable by death, including theft, cutting down a tree, and robbing a rabbit warren. China of the late Qing dynasty had some 850 capital crimes, many reflecting the privileged position of male over female and senior over junior.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-295
Author(s):  
F.I. Ushkov ◽  
O.I. Mironova

The urgency of a study of rapport problem between a penitentiary psychologist and a juvenile convict is due to the fact that interpersonal contact has a significant impact on the success of the professional activity of a penitentiary psychologist, and helps to build trusting relationships with an adolescent. The study involved 50 psychologists in educational colonies of Russia. A specially designed questionnaire “Problem-psychological content of interpersonal contacts of a psychologist with a minor convict” was used. The study confirmed that the ability to build rapport with a minor convict depends primarily on the developed communicative and moral qualities of a psychologist. The specialists use a wide range of methods and techniques for building rapport, however, they have fragmented notion on the stages of establishing interpersonal contact, their specificity and sequence.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fu-Shuang Li ◽  
Pyae Phyo ◽  
Joseph Jacobowitz ◽  
Mei Hong ◽  
Jing-Ke Weng

Sporopollenin is a ubiquitous and extremely chemically inert biopolymer that constitutes the outer wall of all land-plant spores and pollen grains. Sporopollenin protects the vulnerable plant gametes against a wide range of environmental assaults, and is considered as a prerequisite for the migration of early plants onto land. Despite its importance, the chemical structure of plant sporopollenin has remained elusive. Using a newly developed thioacidolysis degradative method together with state-of-the-art solid-state NMR techniques, we determined the detailed molecular structure of pine sporopollenin. We show that pine sporopollenin is primarily composed of aliphatic-polyketide-derived polyvinyl alcohol units and 7-O-p-coumaroylated C16 aliphatic units, crosslinked through a distinctive m-dioxane moiety featuring an acetal. Naringenin was also identified as a minor component of pine sporopollenin. This discovery answers the long-standing question about the chemical makeup of plant sporopollenin, laying the foundation for future investigations of sporopollenin biosynthesis and for design of new biomimetic polymers with desirable inert properties.


Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Dougal

Robert Burns, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and song writer, continues to maintain a substantial cultural ‘afterlife’ in the twenty first century, both within Scotland and beyond. Achieving cult status in the nineteenth century, the power of Burns as a popular cultural icon remains undiminished. Where the appropriation of Burns as national icon in the nineteenth century was made manifest in statuary, commemorative objects, and painted portraits, the twenty-first century has been marked by the proliferation of the image of Burns in new forms and  technologies, with Burns as product and brand logo, museum and heritage attraction, and tourism industry selling point. This recent flourishing of interest and engagement raises questions about why and how an eighteenth-century poet continues to be the object of such extensive cultural elaboration at this time. In approaching this question, some fruitful lines of enquiry are being suggested in recent discussions that have looked at the nineteenth-century Burns as a ‘mobilizing agent in collective memory production’ (Rigney 2011, 81). One such appraisal points to how the construction of Burns in the nineteenth century as an iconic figure of Scottish cultural memory has the potential to ‘be resignified as necessary in subsequent chronological and geographical sites’ (Davis 2010, 14). It is this potential for the resignification of Burns as a symbolic site for the nation’s memory that this paper explores. In pointing to Burns’ representation in a variety of popular forms and in public discourse, the paper examines how a writer comes to be invested and reinvested as the voice and persona of the nation.


Author(s):  
Nguyen Van Chinh

Drying shrinkage is the main cause of early age cracking of concrete and mortar. A wide range of research has been conducted to reduce the drying shrinkage, including using fibres or chemical admixtures. This paper investigated the effect of shrinkage reducing admixture on the flexural strength, compressive strength, drying shrinkage, water absorption and porosity of mortar. The mix compositions were ordinary Portland cement (OPC) : sand : liquid = 1: 1: 0.38 in which liquid consisted of water and shrinkage reducing admixture (SRA). SRA was used at the proportions of 2%, 4%, and 7% by weight of cement. The test results show that SRA reduces the flexural and compressive strengths of mortar. The reduction in flexural strength and compressive strength at 28 days is 14% and 25%, respectively at 7% SRA dosage. In addition, SRA significantly reduces the drying shrinkage and water absorption of mortar. At 7% SRA dosage, the drying shrinkage at 53 days is reduced by 60% while the water absorption rate at 24 hours is reduced by 54%. However, SRA has a minor effect on the pore size distribution, effective porosity, and cumulative intrusion volume of mortar.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lesley Wright

<p>The sexual behaviour of young emergent adult women in New Zealand has become a target of media attention and commentary. Moralising language is prevalent in the public discourse, describing young women negatively with respect to character and psychology. Research investigating the increase of cultural artefacts such as hooking up or casual sex is often risk-focused, concentrating predominantly on detrimental impacts such as STIs, rape-risks, and depression. Some feminist analyses describe behaviour as postfeminist or as examples of false consciousness. Despite these positions, young New Zealand women are engaging in these and other non-relationship sexual activities in growing numbers, suggesting that current approaches are failing to capture salient explanatory information. Due to the negative impacts of social constraints such as the sexual double standard, traditional femininity and moralising social commentary on young women it is important to present a more holistic image of their behaviour so as to provide a deeper explanatory view which better accounts for young women’s experiences and motivations. In this study I utilise a mixed method research design to access a wide range of participants on a sensitive research topic. A self-selecting sample of 163 young women aged between 18 and 30, recruited from various university campuses around New Zealand, completed an online survey. From this group 18 heterosexually-identifying young women were selected to participate in instant messaging, email and face to face interviews, and an online discussion group. To analyse the material they provided I use a Third Wave feminist theoretical lens in order to give primacy not only to their voices but also their claims to agency and the importance of subjective positionality. I use Sexual Script Theory as a framework to illuminate the impact of cultural dialogues on individuals, and space was conceptualised as a way to illustrate performances and agency. Results suggest that young New Zealand women are strongly affected by risk-focused and moralising dialogues to the effect that they have internalised a risk-focused cultural script that guides their sexual interactions and behaviours within socio-sexual culture in constrained and avoidant ways. Other performed scripts such as ‘good girl’ femininity, traditional masculinity, and the normative performance of heterosex also presented as barriers to subjective sexual experience/development. However, many young women in this study were resistant to some of these scripts, as evidenced in their attempts to occupy traditionally masculine and/or social spaces where non-normative behaviours are (partially) permitted. Their behaviour suggests critical engagement with their socio-sexual environment and some awareness of script elements that dictate acceptable feminine behaviour, and how these constraints can be (at least temporarily) resisted as a means to not only developing sexual subjectivity but also to refashioning modern femininity.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen

Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.


Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones

This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.


Rough Waters ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 63-76
Author(s):  
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

This chapter explores the day-to-day lives and interactions of seamen and maritime crew within Franco-American shipping at the end of the eighteenth century. It analyses what it considers ‘culturally substantive’ relationships between crew-members, where friendship, language-exchange, and working knowledge of each other's’ maritime and naval systems developed between French and American seamen during the American Revolution and the Franco-American Alliance of 1778. These results come from the study of diplomatic and military records. It clarifies that maritime labour facilitated cultural exchange, and that to view this period as either Atlantic or Mediterranean is too narrow a specification for such an intermingled period of history.


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