scholarly journals Usurpation of Aristocratic Privilege and the Social Identity of the Polish Noble Elite in the Period of the Partitions

2022 ◽  
Vol 128 (5) ◽  
pp. 79-104
Author(s):  
Mikołaj Getka-Kenig

The aristocratic titles, which the partitioning monarchies granted to some of their Polish noble subjects in the long nineteenth century, did not play a decisive role in the development and formation of the modern Polish noble elite. The foreign titles could only sanction the internal noble hierarchy, which was apparently much more determined by specific noble traditions and the cult of the pre-partition past. This argument is evidenced by the cases of families which did not need formal title grants to be recognized as truly aristocratic in that period.

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aytan Hajiyeva

The literary orientation based on common principles is determined on the same cultural, ethical and aesthetic traditions, the same outlook, philosophy of life, related principles of creativity and the unified social, cultural and historical environment. Public and political views also usually act as a powerful driving force. The nineteenth century literature is one of the stages distinguished with ideological and aesthetic achievements of the Azerbaijani literary culture which has rich history. Emerging as a reflection of new historical conditions, this literature attracts attention as an original and peculiar phenomenon because of its literary and poetic qualities. Literature that reflects the world through literary paints depending on the angle of view, approach, ethno-cultural thinking, is also of interest as the product of its formation era and environment. As fiction or poetic literature reflects life, it is important to understand the reflection of the social, socio-historical processes, to “catch the pulse" of  life, and to address worldwide problems that are relevant for all periods. The writer's social life, social activities, and communication circle sometimes play a decisive role in issues such as being more aware of problems and finding ways to solve them. Azerbaijani literature which has historically been at different stages of development, has not only gained new qualities, but also has been able to preserve the existing tradition, influenced by different literary trends and different socio-cultural processes.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston

Victorian sensation literature was inextricably related to identity and the body: its primary purposes were to elicit a physical response from the senses of readers and to question “the social formation of the self” (Taylor, The Secret 2). Sensation fiction regularly relied on different, deformed, or diseased bodies to provoke fear or unease in its readers, and it created anxiety by juxtaposing the domestic with scandal, crime, and Gothicism to disturb the perceived stability of the home and social identity. Lyn Pykett argues that the genre reproduces the “real mid-nineteenth-century anxiety” that domestic selfhood “could be disrupted by danger, death or disease on the one hand, and the vagaries of the law, the banking system or the stockmarket on the other” (“Collins” 59). Nineteenth-century critics’ reactions to sensation novels connected anxieties about the body to fears about the instability of social identity: contemporary reviews described sensation literature and its works as “feverish” (Smith 141), “a collective cultural nervous disorder” (Taylor, The Secret 4), and as “symptoms of . . . social disease” (Pykett, “Collins” 51). In his 1880–81 series of essays, “Fiction Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin argues that the “[p]hysically diseased, ‘deformed,’ and ignobly dead bodies [in Collins's and Dickens's novels] are symptomatic of diseased and deformed genres, produced by morally and physically ill writers to cater to the tastes of morally and physically diseased urban readers” (Holmes, Fictions 92). These extreme critical responses, as well as the extreme popularity of sensation fiction, call attention to Victorian preoccupation with the body and social identity and with the instability of both. This paper, through analyzing the instability of bodies and identities in Wilkie Collins's sensation novel No Name (1862) and its serial context, challenges readings by both Victorian and more recent critics that distinctly interpret diseased and disabled bodies in the novel as either symbolic of or a result of social deviance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Behringer ◽  
Kai Sassenberg ◽  
Annika Scholl

Abstract. Knowledge exchange via social media is crucial for organizational success. Yet, many employees only read others’ contributions without actively contributing their knowledge. We thus examined predictors of the willingness to contribute knowledge. Applying social identity theory and expectancy theory to knowledge exchange, we investigated the interplay of users’ identification with their organization and perceived usefulness of a social media tool. In two studies, identification facilitated users’ willingness to contribute knowledge – provided that the social media tool seemed useful (vs. not-useful). Interestingly, identification also raised the importance of acquiring knowledge collectively, which could in turn compensate for low usefulness of the tool. Hence, considering both social and media factors is crucial to enhance employees’ willingness to share knowledge via social media.


2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khatija Bibi Khan ◽  
Owen Seda

Feminist critics have identified the social constructedness of masculinity and have explored how male characters often find themselves caught up in a ceaseless quest to propagate and live up to an acceptable image of manliness. These critics have also explored how the effort to live up to the dictates of this social construct has often come at great cost to male protagonists. In this paper, we argue that August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone present the reader with a coterie of male characters who face the dual crisis of living up to a performed masculinity and the pitfalls that come with it, and what Mazrui has referred to as the phenomenon of “transclass man.” Mazrui uses the term transclass man to refer to characters whose socio-economic and socio-cultural experience displays a fluid degree of transitionality. We argue that the phenomenon of transclass man works together with the challenges of performed masculinity to create characters who, in an effort to adjust to and fit in with a new and patriarchal urban social milieu in America’s newly industrialised north, end up destroying themselves or failing to realise other possibilities that may be available to them. Using these two plays as illustrative examples, we further argue that staged masculinity and the crisis of transclass man in August Wilson’s plays create male protagonists who break ranks with the social values of a collectively shared destiny to pursue an individualistic personal trajectory, which only exacerbates their loss of social identity and a true sense of who they are.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Fellmann

In this paper I claim that the metaphysical concept of culture has come to an end. Among the European authors Georg Simmel is the foremost who has deconstructed the myth of culture as a substantial totality beyond relations or prior to them. Two tenets of research have prepared the end of all-inclusive culture: First, Simmel’s formal access that considers society as the modality of interactions and relations between individuals, thus overcoming the social evolutionism of Auguste Comte; second, his critical exegesis of idealistic philosophy of history, thus leaving behind the Hegelian tradition. Although Simmel adheres in some statements to the out-dated idea of morphological unity, his sociological and epistemological thinking paved the way for the concept of social identity as a network of series connected loosely by contiguity. This type of connection is confirmed by the present feeling of life as individual self-invention according to changing situations.


Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


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