Afterword: Early Nineteenth-Century American Studies and the World-Systems Perspective

2008 ◽  
pp. 301-304
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.


Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.


2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 727-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
E. Susan Manning ◽  
Thomas D. Hall

The world-systems perspective was invented for modeling and interpreting the expansion and deepening of the capitalist regional system as it emerged in Europe and incorporated the whole globe over the past 500 years (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994). The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of “advanced” economically developed and powerful states dominating and exploiting “less developed” peripheral regions has been a central concept in the world-systems perspective. In the last decade the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and smaller intersocietal systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1994) have argued that the contemporary global political economy is simply a continuation of a 5,000-year-old world system that emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) have modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup networks composed of sedentary foragers, as well as larger systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian empires, and the contemporary global system in their scope of comparison.


PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-432
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Schneider

Among the reviews of poetry in the early nineteenth century few have been more celebrated, or more notorious, than the review of Coleridge's Christabel which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816. The Quarterly on Keats, Mr. Blackwood's young men on the Cockney School, Jeffrey's “This will never do” of the Excursion, and the Edinburgh Review's indirect and unwitting gift to the world of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—perhaps only these have had greater fame, of sorts. The destroyers of new poets may have had an inkling of the vengeance of posterity, for the authorship of some of these reviews was a mystery exceptionally well preserved even for that age of anonymous criticism. Time, however, and amateur detectives have succeeded in fixing the responsibility for most of them; the review of Christabel is the chief remaining puzzle.


1994 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kepecs ◽  
Gary Feinman ◽  
Sylviane Boucher

AbstractFor too long, Mayanists working in northern Yucatan have retained a focus on the single site. Although a few recent papers have begun to examine this area in regional terms, the world-systems perspective has yet to be applied. In this paper the world-systems framework is used to examine the post-Teotihuacan core center of Chichen Itza and its hinterland. Various lines of information are combined to achieve the fullest possible picture, including new settlement-pattern data, related ethnohistoric material, and a brief consideration of existing iconographie studies. Comparative examples from contemporary sites in other parts of Mesoamerica are provided to illustrate the systemic interconnections that characterize a “world system.”


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