The Bi-Social Oscar Wilde and "Modern" Women

2001 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Diane Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Professional Women ◽  
Women's Careers ◽  
The World ◽  
Women’S Careers ◽  
A Performance

Oscar Wilde was important not only to late-Victorian men but to women as well, especially to those middle-class professional women and feminists who defined themselves as "modern." As an editor, advisor, and advancer of women's careers, Wilde demonstrated that he had learned well the lessons taught by his mother, a working author. His ability to move between the homosocial masculine world and the world of women made him almost uniquely "bi-social." Yet Wilde's concept of friendship - based on a performance-oriented model of high-spot moments and grand gestures, rather than on endurance and dependability - also offended some women writers of his circle and provoked them to create satirical portraits of him. By looking to the now little-known works by "modern" women of the 1890s, we can get a new and more complete view both of Wilde himself and of his relation to the development of feminism at the fin de sièècle.

History Turmoil And Politico-Cultural Conditions of the Sub-Continental Men In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Gunasekaran N ◽  
Bhuvaneshwari S
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
First Time

Salman Rushdie remains a major Indian writer in English. His birth coincides with the birth of a new modern nation on August 15, 1947. He has been justly labelled by the critics as a post-colonial writer who knows his trade well. His second novel Midnight’s Children was published in 1981 and it raised a storm in the hitherto middle class world of fiction writing both in English and in vernaculars. Rushdie for the first time burst into the world of fiction with subversive themes like impurity, illegitimacy, plurality and hybridity. He understands that a civilization called India may be profitably understood as a dream, a collage of many colours, a blending of cultures and nationalities, a pluralistic society and in no way unitary.

“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
West African ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Lesbian Relationships ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Headed Households

This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-headed households, gay and lesbian relationships, and networks of female friendship and civic engagement. Pym’s novels of the 1950s implicitly criticize the synchronic, functionalist anthropology of kinship tables that dominated the discipline in Britain, substituting an interest in a new anthropology that could investigate social change. Specific anthropological work on West African social changes underpins Pym’s English fiction, including several journal articles that Pym was editing while she worked on her novels.

Comedy and the Athenian Ideal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Konstan
Keyword(s):  
American Democracy ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
The World ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Hellenistic World ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
New Comedy ◽  
A Performance

New Comedy was a Panhellenic phenomenon. It may be that a performance in Athens was still the acme of a comic playwright’s career, but Athens was no longer the exclusive venue of the genre. Yet Athens, or an idealized version of Athens, remained the setting or backdrop for New Comedy, whatever its provenance or intended audience. New Comedy was thus an important vehicle for the dissemination of the Athenian polis model throughout the Hellenistic world, and it was a factor in what has been termed ‘the great convergence’. The role of New Comedy in projecting an idealized image of the city-state may be compared to that of Hollywood movies in conveying a similarly romanticized, but not altogether false, conception of American democracy to populations around the world.

Cross-Currents in the River of Time: Conceptualizing the Complexities of Women's Careers

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary N. Powell ◽  
Lisa A. Mainiero
Keyword(s):  
Objective Measures ◽  
Women's Careers ◽  
Research Organizations ◽  
Life Success ◽  
Women’S Careers ◽  
Over Time

Womenface a complex panorama of choices and constraints in their career and life development. This article presents an approach to the understanding of women's careers that (a) takes into account non-work as well as work issues; (b) incorporates subjective as well as objective measures of career and life success; (c) incorporates the influence of personal, organizational, and societalfactors on women's choices and outcomes; and (d) does not assume that women's careers go through a predictable sequence of stages over time. Such an approach is vastly differentfrom traditional models of men's careers. Implications of this approach for research, organizations, and men's careers are discussed.

The lords of humankind re-visited

2003 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHERINE HALL
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Irish Catholics ◽  
The Way

This article uses the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, and the way in which it was represented in Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting of it, to reflect on the ways in which Britons thought of themselves as an ’imperial people’, ’lords of humankind’, fit to rule over others. The Whig reforms of the 1830s had brought the enfranchisement of large numbers of middle-class men, and the emancipation of the enslaved across the British Empire. Excavating the assumptions of the abolitionists who gathered at the Convention allows us to see how new hierarchies of difference were encoded by 1840, placing freed black men, middle-class women and Irish Catholics on the margins of the new body politic.

Across the Western Sea (1783-1845)

1962 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kraus
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Native Land ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.IA Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.

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