scholarly journals ‘All across Europe it had come’: The Black Death and Fascism in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Piette
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Female Community ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Medieval Europe

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s wartime novel The Corner that Held Them (1948), about a nunnery during the Black Death, reflects on female community and bonding in a period of male fascist violence. The novel explores the shift from pacifism to acceptance of the need for anti-fascist war which characterised Warner’s intellectual beliefs from the 1930s into wartime, probing the arts of peace in compositional practice. Such a dialectic of war and peace is considered in relation to what Maud Ellmann has described as the outward turn to collective choral consciousness in mid-century modernism. This article explores both the staging of fascism as plague and the feminist daring and limits that Warner saw as operative in female witnessing and withstanding of Nazi ideology and menace. It closely reads key scenes from the panorama of a novel (notably Alianor’s stillness as her husband is killed, Alicia’s plans to withstand the economic impact of the Black Death and the cure of Ralph’s plague symptoms) to register the satirical and allegorical substance of Warner’s rescripting of Woolfian notions of resistance to warmongering misogyny by a society of outsiders. The readings seek to consolidate a varied and multiple sense of the book as a Marxist historical novel that gives voice to the ruled. In doing so Warner analyses the Black Death as a moment in history that saw the emergence of early modern capitalism and labour relations out of the feudal system, even as the religious framework that had structured medieval Europe gave way to more secular beliefs in autonomy, self-determination, citizen and collective dreams, projects and affects. At the same time the plague as a political trope, rooted in anti-fascist rhetoric that turns Nazi anti-Semitic uses of the Black Death motif on their head, triggers readings that bring those historical scenes into allegorical relation with the ways in which the Second World War was experienced by marginalised female communities.

scholarly journals “The Pugachevites” by E. A. Salias in the Reception of F. M. Dostoevsky: on the Epic Character of the Russian Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 92-113
Author(s):  
Nadezhda G. Mikhnovets
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Russian Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Further Development

The article analyzes the nature of the interaction between first-line literature and fiction in the 1860–1870s as dynamic, versatile and dialogical. It is argued that the historical novel by E. A. Salias “The Pugachevites” (1874), based on the discoveries of the epic novel “War and Peace” by L. N. Tolstoy, testified to the process of strengthening the epic tendency in Russian literature of the 19th century. The novel by E. A. Salias was not exclusively secondary, the portrayal of the “predatory type” hero became innovative, but not deeply understood by the fiction writer. It is noted that further development was undertaken by F. M. Dostoevsky at the first stage of the creation of the novel “The Adolescent”. Its distinctive feature was the consideration of the “predatory type” in the context of the Russian history of spiritual quests of the 17th–19th centuries. The description of the stages of development of the type by F. M. Dostoevsky made it possible to come to the conclusion that the process of cognition of the Russian character, the identification of the laws of the historical development of Russia presupposed a versatile comprehension of the national foundations of life, which predetermined the epic character as the leading feature of the Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Drawing the Written Woman

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Sonia Lagerwall
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Dynamic Adaptation ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Artistic Training

This article deals with Philippe Druillet's three-volume comic adaptation (1980–1985) of Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert's historical novel from 1862, set three centuries BC. Flaubert was famous for not wanting his texts illustrated: he argued that the preciseness of images would undo the poetic vagueness of his written words. The article examines how Druillet tackles the challenge of graphically representing Flaubert's canonical work without reducing the priestess Salammbô into a given type. The analysis shows a dynamic adaptation process in which Druillet gives a kaleidoscopic form to Flaubert's text. His variation on the Salammbô character foregrounds photography, a medium historically relevant to the novel but also to Druillet's own artistic training. Featuring his character Lone Sloane in the role of Mathô, the adaptation proves to be a highly personal appropriation of the novel, where Druillet enhances an autobiographical dimension of his work previously hinted at in La Nuit and Gaïl.

Ronald Lockley and the Archipelagic Imagination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damian Walford Davies
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Dynamic Research

Ronald Lockley (1903–2000), distinguished naturalist, pioneering conservationist, author in multiple genres, and paradigmatic modern ‘island dweller’, played a crucial role in defining our sense of Welsh and wider archipelagic ‘islandness’. Drawing on ‘nissology’—a dynamic ‘research frontier’ that brings together the arts, sciences, and social sciences to scrutinize not only islands ‘in their own terms’, but also the complex cultural condition of islandness—this chapter offers an analysis of how Welsh island space is mediated through Lockley’s plethora of discourses, from autobiographical narratives of island existence to definitive field studies and scientific papers, to works of popular anthropology, social history, and the novel Seal Woman (1974). It demonstrates how Lockley’s construction of a series of relational Welsh identities is linked to wider British and global archipelagic locations of culture.

At the Edge of Reformation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Linehan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

Kidnapped

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
West Coast ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
First Time ◽  
Adventure Stories

Your bed shall be the moorcock’s, and your life shall be like the hunted deer’s, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.’ Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous company of Jacobite outlaw and suspected assassin Alan Breck Stewart. Their unlikely friendship is put to the test as they dodge government troops across the Scottish Highlands. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Kidnapped transforms the Romantic historical novel into the modern thriller. Its heart-stopping scenes of cross-country pursuit, distilled to a pure intensity in Stevenson’s prose, have become a staple of adventure stories from John Buchan to Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming. Kidnapped remains as exhilarating today as when it was first published in 1886. This new edition is based on the 1895 text, incorporating Stevenson’s last thoughts about the novel before his death. It includes Stevenson’s ‘Note to Kidnapped’, reprinted for the first time since 1922.

Obsolescence

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 718-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
American Novel ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Status ◽  
Material State ◽  
Different Response

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.

Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. ix, 437. $27.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-251
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.

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