Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Sentimental Catechism: Archbishop James Gibbons, Mass-Print Culture, and American Literary History

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-119
Author(s):  
James Emmett Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Society ◽  
Gender Paradoxes

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) andClarissa(1747-1748) to Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol(1843) andLittle Dorrit(1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.

scholarly journals 'It could have all turned out differently'

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergey Toymentsev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Conservative Ideology

This paper examines the marriage-plot convention of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in the context of the conservative ideology of the “middle-class aristocracy” in early nineteenth-century England. It argues that despite Mansfield Park’s apparent endorsement of the patriarchal values of domesticity and femininity represented by the protagonists and the narrator, the novel does contain on equally valid yet utopian alternative offered by Henry Crawford, an alternative of difference and vitalistic openness necessarily suppressed by the regulatory pattern of the marriage plot.

Burney's The Wanderer and Early-Nineteenth-Century Commodity Fetishism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Wanderer

This essay explores a particular moment in the history of commodity fetishism by means of an examination of Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814). The novel, which is explicitly concerned with the social changes facing early-nineteenth-century England, reveals that at this historical moment the commodity inspired emotions of a particular kind: it was idealized and perceived as attractively individualized, aloof, exotic, and changeable, and it elicited a passionate and sometimes even painful form of desire. In The Wanderer Burney explores the human repercussions of this new way of engaging with objects in the marketplace. She reveals, moreover, the extent to which the fetishism of the commodity reflected not just developments within the economy but also political change: under the influence of the French Revolution the charisma once generated by social status was transferred to the economic realm, where, embodied in the commodity, it gave rise to a pleasurable but masochistic reverence. Burney'sargument for the usefulness of economic independence necessarily leads her to appreciate the commodity fetishism she describes: even while she develops a labor theory of value, Burney promotes a mystification of the commodity by insisting on the aloof independence of both labor and its products. Thus, Burney uses the apparent autonomy of things——which Marx decries——as a means to argue for the autonomy of the makers of those things.

scholarly journals In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Civic Activism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Role

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

Translation and Its Affects

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Language ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Do So

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.

scholarly journals Chief of this River

2019 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Rick Fehr ◽  
Janet Macbeth ◽  
Summer Sands Macbeth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Upper Canada ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous History ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
The Face

The narratives of European settlement in Canada have largely excluded the presence of Indigenous peoples on contested lands. This article offers an exploration of an Anishinaabeg community and a regional chief in early nineteenth century Upper Canada. The community known as the Chenail Ecarté land, and Chief Zhaawni-binesi, have become historically obscure. Through the use of primary documents the authors explore the community’s history, its relocation, and Chief Zhaawni-binesi’s role in the War of 1812 and in community life. Ultimately, the paper charts the relocation of the community in the face of mounting settler encroachment. The discussion attempts to increase knowledge and appreciation of Indigenous history in Southwestern Ontario.

scholarly journals The Rushdie Affair – Politics, Culture and Ethnicity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

Politeja ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (31/2)) ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Ossowska-Czader
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Hanif Kureishi ◽  
Second Generation Immigrants ◽  
The Face ◽  
British Muslims

The aim of this paper is to show how politics, culture and ethnicity interweave in the context of the Rushdie Affair in both the real‑life dimension of the historical events taking place in the late 1980s, as well as the literary dimension of the novel by Hanif Kureishi entitled The Black Album. The paper briefly outlines the Rushdie Affair as it unfolded in the British public sphere with particular emphasis placed on the process of consolidation of the Muslim identity among the representatives of different ethnic groups in Great Britain in the political and cultural context of the event which is deemed to be defining from the point of view of British Muslims. The author of the paper presents the profile of Hanif Kureishi, to indicate why he is ideally positioned to look critically at both sides of the conflict. The paper analyses the novel itself insofar as it examines the implications of the Rushdie Affair depicted in The Black Album, the reactions of the second‑generation immigrants of Pakistani descent in the face of the controversy, the influence this event exerted on the process of their searching for identity as well as their integration into British society. Two opposing identity options taken up by the protagonists of The Black Album are analysed by the author of the paper.

Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Josephine Hoegaerts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
National Language ◽  
Systematic Observation ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

The nineteenth century saw a rise in the categorization and systematic observation of manifestations of dysfluent speech. This article examines how, from the 1820s onward, different vocabularies to distinguish between different speech impediments were developed in France, Germany and Britain. It also charts how different meanings, categories and chronologies of ‘stammering’ knowledge were exchanged transnationally. The universalist medical models emerging around stammering were, despite this constant exchange, also closely connected to cultural imaginations of speech, the particular values assigned to one’s (national) language and political modes of belonging. Although the analysis is largely based on prescriptive texts, it also reveals how embodied experiences of dysfluency informed the medical and pedagogical work undertaken in the nineteenth century: a remarkable number of ‘experts’ on speech impediments claimed to be ‘former sufferers’. The history of dysfluency in the nineteenth century is therefore not one of linear medicalization and pathologization, but a continuous exchange of vocabularies between different actors of middle-class culture. Expertise on speaking ‘well’ was shared in medical treatises, but also on the benches of parliament, in cheap self-help pamphlets, in the parlour, or in debating clubs – suggesting that the model of ‘recovery’ was a manifestation of (middle class) culture rather than of a strictly medical discourse.

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