scholarly journals Alberto Blest Gana and the Sensory Appeal of Wealth

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Patricia Vilches
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Alberto Blest Gana ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

Abstract This essay explores sensory stimuli in La aritmética en el amor [Arithmetic in Love/Economics of Love] (1860) as they relate to the consumer preferences (for clothing, furniture, jewellery) and purchasing practices of nineteenth-century Santiago, Chile. The novel presents detailed descriptions, for example, of fine fabrics, emphasising the sounds that the wearers of such fabric reproduce as they move about. Wealthy or not, people feel the pressure to present themselves in their best garments, but the “best noise” is made by the rich, who transmit the affect of opulence to the less fortunate. Overall, to radiate a sensory appeal, characters frequent the city of Santiago and patronise the finest clothing stores. From our very first encounter with the protagonist Fortunato Esperanzano, he is dressed accordingly, engaging with Santiago and showing in his persona that he shops only for nice clothes and the best cigars. From a Lefebvrian perspective, Fortunato represents how Chile’s modernisation transforms the capital’s “marketplace” as a social space where a new luxury economy flourishes and a traditional, rigid social order is maintained.

Sets and the City: Staging London and Oliver Twist

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-90
Author(s):  
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
City Life ◽  
The City

This chapter tracks multiple ways in which Oliver Twist and London’s cityscape were adapted for the stage in the late 1830s. It argues that London was a flexible frame through which the audience’s reception of Dickens’s work was mediated in early dramatisations, but also that the novel was imaginatively mapped on to the built environment. For example, Sadler’s Wells emphasise the proximity of the criminal scenes by staging their adaptation as a local drama, while the Surrey Theatre presents their play as an opportunity for armchair tourism. In staging alternative versions of the city, theatres presented differently nuanced portrayals of its inhabitants and perceived social problems. The dynamic re-presentation of Oliver Twist in early theatrical adaptations is thereby indicative of the malleability of Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century improvement debates, and these plays were likewise supposed to have an effect on contemporary city-life. Playscripts, stagecraft, actors’ performances, music, and the perceived identities of theatres and their audiences each played a role in curating these representations, and so this chapter adopts an intertheatrical methodology.

scholarly journals The Use of Marriage Data to Measure the Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Britain

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Prandy ◽  
W. Bottero
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Very High ◽  
Underlying Dimension

This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.

scholarly journals Periferni likovi u romanu U registraturi Ante Kovačića

2021 ◽  
pp. 272-285
Author(s):  
Marijana Terić
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fantasy Literature ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Fantastic Realism ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

In this paper, the author examines a work of one of the most significant Croatian literary writers, Ante Kovačić, whose novel U registraturi (In the Registry Office) is considered by many literary critics and theoreticians to be the best writing of Croatian realism. It is an author who was not understood at the time when his work appeared, which is why the text was published in the form of a novel with a twenty-three year delay. Nonlinear composition of the text, elements of fantasy literature and innovative literary process in creating a fabula and sujet course of events confused literary critics as well as readership, which points to the fact that Ante Kovačić was treated for a long time as a peripheral author. In this narrative text, the misery and helplessness of peasants and their revolt against their feudal lords in Croatia are described, therefore the object of our analysis will be the characterisation of figures from various layers of society, with a particular focus on the “peripheral characters” of Kovačić’s prose. Using the term “peripheral characters” we will attempt to bring close those characters of subjugated peasants in relation to the feudal-capitalist social layer and thereby emphasise their role in the novel in relation to their fate. Unlike the characters of the peasants – Ivica Kičmanović (whom the social order turns into a lackey and scoundrel); Jožica Zgubidan (the personification of a poor person from Zagorje), Anica (a patriarchal girl with an angelic face); Miha; Perica; the neighbouring Kanoniks; and the Medonjićes – Kovačić brings us harsh, drastic images of moral vacillations in the city in which figures, distorted into caricatures, dominate. By contrasting the rural environment with the city life, the author is writing an “epopee of the village and city” in which the “peripheral characters” become tragic ones. These characters are the carriers of elements of “fantastic realism,” and their function is to show all the depravities of society and to announce the phenomenon of the innovative processes of narration familiar to authors of the modern literature. Finally, we come to the conclusion that Ante Kovačić made a step forward in relation to the generation of realists, with the peripheral position of his creation disappearing with the emergence of modern literary achievements, which ultimately gives the author and his work a polished place in Croatian literature.

The Possibility of Nonsectarian Futures: Emerging Disruptive Identities of Place in the Belfast of Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory

10.1068/d53j ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stainer
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Imaginative Geographies ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Ciaran Carson ◽  
The City

In this paper I aim to excavate and interpret a series of ‘disruptive’ narratives of place in the novel The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson, a series of prose essays which construct an intimate, remembered, and defining vision of the city of Belfast (1997, Granta, London). I argue throughout that conflict in Northern Ireland is underwritten and informed by the imaginative geographies of rival, antagonistic, and sterile forms of sectarian nationalism, and that it is therefore necessary to seek alternative means of conceptualising social space and ‘the city’ which do not rely on narrow cultural categories and arbiters of difference. The text articulates an imaginative reinvention of the city of Belfast which goes beyond the traditional (and problematic) narratives of sectarianism, suggesting that place identity and the urban geographical experience are characterised by fluidity, hybridity, and changing perspectives.

scholarly journals Architectural objects as elements of the social space of the city in the subject field of social sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Н. К. Міхно
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Subject Field ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

The study tested that cities are studied from different perspectives: from city-to-city links, structural elements of urban space to everyday practices of cities. Among the representatives of the scientific field, which made a significant contribution to the development of the theory of urban research is to highlight J. Bodriyar, P. Bourdieu, D. Becker, D. Jacobs, C. Lynch, A. Lefevra, M. Castells, D. Garvey, A. Scott, R. Pal, J. Fischer, H. Delitz and others. Moreover interesting and thorough are the scientific works of Ukrainian researchers – V. Sereda, M. Sobolevskaya, L. Males, Y. Soroka, D. Sudin, A. Petrenko-Lisak, A. Mikheeva, L. Nagorna, O. Musiyuzdov and a number of others. In this case, the methodological position of the researchers is relevant, which states that the symbolic space of the city is formed through the ability of visual objects to translate cultural and symbolic codes with the help of geometric, semantic and aesthetic characteristics. For example, in this work, one of the key terms is «architectural landscapes» with which it is possible to analyze the combination of spatial forms in the city with meaningful cultural and ideological content. It was recorded that the signs or symbolic markers can serve as architectural buildings, monuments, memorable signs, street names, informational and promotional posters, and so on. The main objects of research in the sociology of the study of architectural forms gradually became the phenomenon of buildings and structures, as well as the development of theoretical directions in architecture, the study of the place and role of space in sociology and cultural studies. As a result in the methodological space, along with the phenomenological, anthropological, and linguistic turns, the term «architectural turn» appears. From the point of view of the system theory, architecture is not seen as the main subject of research, namely communication on architecture. Accordingly, institutional theory in sociology considers architecture as an «institutional mechanism» that firmly asks individuals a certain social order and allows for the implementation of architectural ideas. On the other hand, at the same time, open questions remain regarding the meaningful content of the meanings contained in the objects of architecture. The postmodern direction, which reveals other aspects of the study of architectural forms, deserves special attention. Discreteness Architectural of social life, «decentralization of the subject», the decomposition of reality into actual and virtual, freedom and spontaneity as characteristics of the postmodern era are reflected and read in the architecture of postmodern. The architectural space of the city is considered by a number of domestic and foreign researchers in the context of symbolic interaction between power structures and actors through architectural constructions and design of a living environment.

The Poetic City

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICENTE QUIRARTE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Role ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
Gender Awareness ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City ◽  
The Invisible

This chapter discusses the ways in which the poet and poetry have traced the invisible map of Mexico City and how this literary art protected and strengthened memories while also helping the Mexicans to live each day with an increased dignity. The focus of this chapter is on the reflections created by the poets and their poetry from the Tenochtitlan period to the early twenty-first century with emphasis on the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This period is specifically a century of prose and poetry that stood as testaments to the beauty, downfall and the rise of Mexico City. Through the poets, poetry has became an avenue for the rich illustrations of the transformations Mexico has undergone such as the rise of nationalism, and the emergence of a gender role and a new gender awareness. Writing in this period has become a source of enlightenment and poets specifically have played a prominent role as urban planners, insiders who narrated the city’s transformations, educators who enforced virtues, and biographers of emotions. From the King Nezahualcóyotl to the poet Eduardo Lizalde, poets have found ways of describing and celebrating the city without falling into despair, because the very naming and exploration of despair is a way of transcending it.

City of Second Sight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin T. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
City Life ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

“Regenten” (Gentlemanly) Capitalism: Saint-Simonian Technocracy and the Emergence of the “Industrialist Great Club” in the Mid-nineteenth Century Netherlands

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-783
Author(s):  
Albert Schrauwers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Stock Market ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Geometric Pattern ◽  
Royal Palace ◽  
The North ◽  
The City ◽  
The Web

The geometric pattern of Amsterdam's canals was iconic of its nineteenth-century social order. The spider's web of canals fanned out along the Amstel river in concentric rings, its barge traffic linking the city to its hinterland, the province of Holland, and to the wider Netherlands of which it is the nominal capital. These canals divided the “Venice of the North” into ninety islands linked by more than a thousand bridges. Imposing aristocratic and merchant houses stretched along the innermost canal ring, the Golden Curve of the Gentleman's Canal. At the center of the web lay de Dam, the 200 m long market square built on the first medieval dike protecting the city from the encroaching sea. The three pillars of the Dutch state framed the market square: the Royal Palace of the Merchant King, the Dutch Reformed New Church, and in the nineteenth century, the Amsterdam stock market, the world's oldest exchange.

Marcus Clarke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Mccann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Commercial Viability ◽  
Cultural Legitimacy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City ◽  
Natural Life

This chapter looks at Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1870–1872), which is considered as his enduring contribution to Australian literature and to a broader literature of empire. The peculiarly citational quality of the novel is barely intelligible without understanding the way in which Clarke came to situate himself in relationship to both colonial literary culture and to an emerging European canon. His acute sense of having to balance cultural legitimacy against commercial viability lends his work an unusual degree of self-consciousness in regard to the processes of commodification and the regimes of cultural capital that were having an enormous impact on the development of mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne, the city in which Clarke lived and worked. Ultimately, a novel like His Natural Life reflects the desire to reproduce the popular textual forms of the metropolis in the everyday experience of the colonies.

scholarly journals Kristin Stapleton (2016). Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family.

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Ronald Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Chinese Literary Criticism ◽  
The City

There are few resources amongst contemporary Chinese literary criticism that manage to weave such insightful literary readings and incisive historical research as Kristin Stapleton’s Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. The book accomplishes three feats, as set out by Stapleton in her introductory chapter, simultaneously incorporating a history of twentieth-century Chengdu (and its relevance to the developments in China during this period, more broadly) alongside the author’s biography of Ba Jin’s formative years in the city and the historiographical context of his novel Family. Such an undertaking by a less skilled author would have, perhaps, produced a work which simplifies the rich historical underpinnings of Ba Jin’s Family to supplementary readings of the novel, coupled with incidental evidence of the political and social machinations of the city in which its author grew up. Not so under Stapleton’s careful guidance. By reading the social and economic development of early twentieth-century Chengdu as much as its fictional counterpart in Ba Jin’s Turbulent Stream trilogy, Stapleton provides a perceptive reading of Family which invites the reader to consider how fiction can enrich and enliven our understanding of history.

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