Means and beginnings: Voicing revolution in Solomos’s early work

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simos Zenios

In this article I read the figurations of poetic voice in Solomos’s early lyric ‘Spiligga’ as a testing site for the conceptualization of the Greek Revolution as a modern political event. Perusing its thematic, intertextual and formal strategies, I argue that two distinct poetic voices are operative in the poem. The first model is commensurate with the voice of nature. The second is a medium of reflective and expressive human speech able to herald the revolution. In order to ascertain the political significance of this juxtaposition, I procure insights from seminal studies in intellectual history that outline the transformations of the term ‘revolution’ at the turn of the eighteenth century (Arendt, Koselleck). The period’s new understanding of the term as an absolute and inaugurating break from an existing state of affairs (which supplanted the previous meaning of revolution as quasi-natural experience that precludes innovation) illuminates the juxtaposition by Solomos of the two models of voice: they represent the revolutionary fissure as an exit from the state of nature and as the innovation of a new order. This reading not only elucidates the encounter of modern revolution and poetry in ‘Spiligga’ but also establishes the latter as a necessary starting point for the examination of this encounter in Solomos’s later works.

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-110
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Hartung

This article comprises a twofold attempt: the first is to establish a semantic field that revolves around the concept of siyāsat—roughly equivalent to the political—in Muslim South Asia; the second is to trace semantic shifts in this field and to identify circumstances that may have prompted those shifts. It is argued here that the terms that constitute the semantic field of the political oscillate between two sociolinguistic traditions: a strongly Islamicate Arabic one, and a more imperially oriented Persian one. Another linguistic shift is indicated with the replacement of Persian by Urdu as the dominant literary idiom in and beyond North India since the eighteenth century. The aim is to serve only as a starting point for a more intensive discussion that brings in other materials and perspectives, thus helping to elucidate the tension between normative aspirations by ruling elites and actual political praxes by variant socioeconomic groups.


1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.


1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 662-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar

It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule. The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead us to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation. In this quest the political theories of the 17th century and particularly of the English Civil War are especially rewarding. It was in those memorable years that all the major issues of modern political theory were first stated, and with the most perfect clarity. As we have come to reject the optimism of the eighteenth century, and the crude positivism of the nineteenth, we tend more and more to return to our origins in search of a new start. This involves a good deal of reinterpretation, as the intensity with which the writings of Hobbes and Locke, for instance, are being reexamined in England and America testify. These philosophical giants have, however, by the force of their ideas been able to limit the scope of interpretive license. A provocative minor writer, such as Harrington, may for this reason be more revealing. The present study is therefore not only an effort to explain more soundly Harrington's own ideas, but also to treat him as an illustration of the mutations that the art of interpreting political ideas has undergone, and, perhaps to make some suggestions about the problems of writing intellectual history in general.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-990 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE

The historiography of the eighteenth-century Church of England remains peculiarly preoccupied with vindicating that institution from the condemnation heaped upon it by Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals in the nineteenth century. The chapters of Jeremy Gregory's Restoration, reformation, and reform characteristically begin with quotations from Victorians on the somnolence and negligence of the Hanoverian Establishment. The starting point is, as it were, a Hogarth cartoon of a corpulent curate and a snoozing congregation. In part this preoccupation is indicative of how little has been done on the subject since the Victorians. Norman Sykes, writing between the 1930s and 1950s, remains an almost solitary beacon for the church's institutional history, though much of his work was biographical, dwelling on clerical high politics rather than on the social fabric of the church in the parishes. About the Hanoverian parish we know little, and probably care less, because without Reformation or Revolution – or nuns or witches – there is little to move the secular-minded to take an interest. It would not, of course, be true to say that nothing has recently been done. There has been something in the field of intellectual history. One thinks of Brian Young's fine Religion and enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain (1998), a filling out of John Pocock's sketch of an English ‘clerical Enlightenment’ – though most intellectual history of that era prefers the wilder shores of deism, freethinking, and the radical assault on priestcraft. There have been valuable probings of the early eighteenth-century politics of religion (the Sacheverell affair, the charity school movement, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners) and of the late Hanoverian roots of nineteenth-century high churchmanship.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON STOBART

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.


1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-678 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. C. Ricklefs

A central problem in both the political and the intellectual history of Java is the disparity between the ideal of a unified state and the historical reality of fragmented power and authority, between the image and the reality of pre-colonial Javanese political history. An investigation of views held by literati of the kingdom of Mataram before the middle years of the eighteenth century can elucidate this problem. Turning from historical-political to religious literature in Javanese may help to resolve it.


Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


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