Racial Duties: Toward a Pragmatist Ethic of Race in W. D. Howells's An Imperative Duty

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-254
Author(s):  
Paul R. Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Social Morality ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ethical Critique

Abstract William Dean Howells's 1891 novel of interracial marriage, An Imperative Duty, has recently received increasing critical attention because of its saturation with the language of contemporary scientific racism and its complex and apparently inconsistent approach to questions of race and identity. The novel's other major conceptual concern with questions of moral duty, clearly announced in its title, has generally been neglected in this discussion. This essay examines the crucial interplay between questions of race and ethics, arguing that Howells's novel undertakes an ethical critique of late-nineteenth-century scientific racism from a specifically Pragmatist philosophical perspective. Reasoning according to Pragmatist principles, and pursuing an inherently Pragmatist narrative form, the novel implicitly asks its readers to understand the ““facts”” of race in terms of their intersections with personal and social morality rather than in strict accord with the essentialist claims of ascendant nineteenth-century race theory. In its refusal of ontological absolutism and its embrace of an ethically pluralist and instrumentalist approach to questions of race, Howells's novel offers a Pragmatist challenge to the interlocking absolutisms of traditional ethics and contemporary scientific racism.

Hurry Up and Wait: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and the Maritime in Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Role

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

scholarly journals A especificidade da representação dos fatos históricos em "Esaú e Jacó", de Machado de Assis * The specificity of historical representation in "Esaú e Jacó", by Machado de Assis

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
LUDMYLLA MENDES LIMA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Machado De Assis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Brazilian History

<p><strong>Resumo: </strong>O presente artigo trata de analisar o modo particular como Machado de Assis constrói a representação dos fatos históricos brasileiros no romance <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. Este romance traz em seu enredo dois importantes fatos históricos ocorridos no final do século XIX: a Abolição da Escravatura, em 1888 e a Proclamação da República, em 1889. O tratamento literário dado pelo autor aos fatos, imprimindo irrelevância aos mesmos no contexto do enredo, revela que para ser Realista ‘à brasileira’, naquelas circunstâncias específicas, era necessário mostrar o curso da História tendo como base a ausência de transformação.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó</em> – História do Brasil.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>This paper intends to analyze the special way Machado de Assis builds the representation of Brazilian historical facts in the novel <em>Esaú e Jacó</em>. This novel brings in its plot two important historical events that happened in the late Nineteenth century: the Abolition of Slavery, in 1888; and the Proclamation of the Republic, in 1889. The literary treatment given by the author to the events, printing irrelevance to them, in the context of the plot, reveals that to build a Brazilian realism, in those circumstances, it was necessary to show the course of history based on the absence of transformation.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Machado de Assis – <em>Esaú e Jacó –</em> Brazilian History.</p>

scholarly journals The monumental landscape from below: public statues, popular interaction and nationalism in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 722-746
Author(s):  
ANNE PETTERSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Methodological Challenge ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Building Project

ABSTRACT:Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

Two Treatments of a Subject: Proust's “La Regarder Dormir” and Valéry's La Dormeuse

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Survey ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

The Novel and the Police Power

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-107
Author(s):  
Deak Nabers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Economic Coercion ◽  
American Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The realist novel has long been understood in terms of its representation of the diffusion of political agency into social and economic practices. This essay claims that realism, at least as it emerged in the work of late-nineteenth-century American writers such as William Dean Howells, does not record this process of diffusion so much as anatomize it, and that novels like A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) participated in a widespread and multivalent effort, in American law and literature alike, to specify the proper boundaries of the state's authority in relation other increasingly visible forms of social and economic coercion.

scholarly journals “It’s All One Big Fantasy”: The Critique of Modernity in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Katya Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Russian Idea

The opposition between Europe and Russia runs through Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, culminating in Mme Epanchina’s declaration that both Europe and the Russians who travel to Europe are “one big fantasy” [Dostoevsky, 2002, p. 615]. In the novel, Dostoevsky uses the exile trope as a literary tool for expressing his Russian idea. Although the spiritual underpinnings of Dostoevsky’s nationalism have been well studied, the secular side of this concept bears further exploration. Peter Wagner argues that nationalism constitutes a response to the nostalgia that is developed in exile following one’s breaking away from tradition. Nineteenth-century nationalism specifically “was an attempt to recreate a sense of origins in the face of the disembedding effects of early modernity and capitalism” [Wagner, 2001, p. 103]. By applying Wagner’s theoretical framework to Dostoevsky’s narrative, the author demonstrates that in its secular essence, Dostoevsky’s nationalism is not a merely localized manifestation of a uniquely Russian sentiment, but a symptom of a larger phenomenon that was taking place in late nineteenth-century Europe. Because Mme Epanchina gets to say the final word in Dostoevsky’s novel, her role and the subtleties of her message will be the primary focus of the present analysis.

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