Faulkner and the Freedom Writers: Slavery’s Narrative in Business Records from Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism to Twenty-First-Century Neoabolitionism

Author(s):  
Calvin Schermerhorn

This chapter contextualizes and explores the interplay of historical narrative and imaginative literature, surveying the historiography to which Faulkner and later writers contributed. Drawing on categories formulated by historian David W. Blight, it races a dialectical movement from an “abolitionist script” (grounded in antebellum ex-slave narratives) that “contrasted the humanity of enslaved people with the instrumentality of paper used to mediate slave transactions,” through a proslavery rhetoric that ignored economic context and ascribed paternalistic qualities to slaveholders, to an uneasy synthesis in antislavery novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who decried “slavery's immoral accounting” while generally “affirm[ing] plantation paternalism.” The postbellum years saw a similar cycle, as emancipationist and white supremacist scripts collided before New South writers combined elements of both into a sentimental “reconciliationist script” that won popular support and influenced many of the era's professional historians.

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 1110-1117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda R. Weber

Just what is it about fame that so alienates women? or, why is it that famous women often speak of their experience of celebrity as something that is ultimately lonely and a shabby substitute for love? And why are these statements of loneliness in celebrity attenuated for mothers? Whether it is a famous American author of the nineteenth century and mother of seven, Harriet Beecher Stowe; an iconic and volatile star of the mid–twentieth century and mother of three, Judy Garland; or a twenty-first-century reality celebrity and mother of eight, Kate Gosselin, these women suggest that the experiences of fame are isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. To paraphrase Stowe, it is not fame and celebrity that satisfies the heart of the female star; it is the old-fashioned comforts of love. Their combined comments are thus a corrective to fans' implied perception of famous people as happy, when, indeed, their celebrity seems to have alienated them from love. Whether the female celebrity seeks romantic or familial love is not clear, and we would do well to realize that the abstract palliative is actually a culturally imagined comfort that probably has little to do with either these women in particular or stardom more broadly. But the consistent remarks about fame as a condition of loneliness establish a discursive imperative that the famous woman speak of longing for affective completion, in turn suggesting that public ardor cannot satisfy the woman's heart. In other words, fame cannot replace love.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

In conclusion, the afterlife and overall importance of the Romantic mad poet as a token of Romanticism’s place in the dual revolutions of political and industrial modernity is reassessed. Images of the convergence of mind and machinery in both imaginative literature and early psychiatric writing are discussed. The main arguments of the book about how the Romantic mad poet emerged and was popularized in the nineteenth century are concluded and summarized, and a series of broader arguments about why the Romantic mad poet became so popular are considered, drawing especially on political and sociological accounts of the idea of ‘genius’.


Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.


Author(s):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Jack Santino

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.


Antiquity ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (315) ◽  
pp. 11-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Allen ◽  
Simon Holdaway ◽  
Patricia Fanning ◽  
Judith Littleton

Here is a paper of pivotal importance to all prehistorians attempting to reconstruct societies from assemblages of shells or stone artefacts in dispersed sites deposited over tens of thousands of years. The authors demonstrate the perilous connections between the distribution and content of sites, their geomorphic formation process and the models used to analyse them. In particular they warn against extrapolating the enticing evidence from Pleistocene Willandra into behavioural patterns by drawing on the models presented by nineteenth-century anthropologists. They propose new strategies at once more revealing and more ethical.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-557
Author(s):  
Rituparna Roy

AbstractA lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore’s novella, Nastanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal – the colonial and glocal – over the course of a century. Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray’s heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata’s choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown – an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the nineteenth century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her twenty-first century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too – both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband. Charulata 2011 thus dramatizes a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.


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