“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

scholarly journals Intermingling of History and Politics in The God of Small Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Md. Abdul Momen Sarker ◽  
Md. Mominur Rahman
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Election ◽  
Small Things ◽  
First Time

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is a post-modern sub-continental writer famous for her first novel The God of Small Things. This novel tells us the story of Ammu who is the mother of Rahel and Estha. Through the story of Ammu, the novel depicts the socio-political condition of Kerala from the late 1960s and early 1990s. The novel is about Indian culture and Hinduism is the main religion of India. One of the protagonists of this novel, Velutha, is from a low-caste community representing the dalit caste. Apart from those, between the late 1960s and early 1990s, a lot of movements took place in the history of Kerala. The Naxalites Movement is imperative amid them. Kerala is the place where communism was established for the first time in the history of the world through democratic election. Some vital issues of feminism have been brought into focus through the portrayal of the character, Ammu. In a word, this paper tends to show how Arundhati Roy has successfully manifested the multifarious as well as simultaneous influences of politics in the context of history and how those affected the lives of the marginalized. Overall, it would minutely show how historical incidents and political ups and downs go hand in hand during the political upheavals of a state.

Archival Enthusiasm

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political History ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

The Entitlements of Merit

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
War Finance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Modern War

This chapter shows how the moral and social dimensions of the subject of army reform grew out of the range of questions that it generated about property and inheritance, as against merit and distinction, in determining both the composition of the French nobility and its relationship to the French royal government. Getting the peacocks to pay raised a number of political dilemmas, however. These, in turn, helped to rule out the old vision of a powerful reforming monarch as the solution to absolute government's financial problems. The political history of the French Revolution thus began with the unavailability of this alternative. Irrespective of the damage done by the argument over military reform to any plausible prospect of relying on Louis XVI to be a patriot king, the model itself pulled strongly against both the realities of modern war finance and the more urgent political need to consolidate the royal debt.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
General Analysis ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.

The Illyrian Provinces: A Step Towards Yugoslavism

1974 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-125
Author(s):  
Susana S. Macesich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Administrative Unit ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe history of the Illyrian Provinces belongs not only to the history of the Napoleonic Era in Europe, but also to that of the development of Yugoslav history in the early part of the nineteenth century. The Provinces can be studied from several aspects: political, social, economic and cultural. This paper will emphasize only one of the offered aspects-namely the impact of the Illyrian Provinces on the concept of Yugoslavism. Three features are of singular importance: first, the effects of the ideas of the French Revolution on the Yugoslavs (development of modern nationalism, use of the vernacular, secularism, abolition of feudalism); second, the effects of the political unification of Dalmatia, Slovenia and part of Croatia under French rule, which brought Croats, Slovenes and Serbs under one political and administrative unit; third, the correlation between French rule in the Western Balkans with the national-revolutionary movements of that period, such as the Serbian uprising of 1804 and its effect upon other Yugoslavs.1

scholarly journals Some Considerations on the Evolving Concepts of Cultural Heritage

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 237
Author(s):  
MSc. Dorina Xheraj-Subashi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Missing Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
Culture Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire Society ◽  
Heritage Legislation

The history of the property as general heritage and access to the entire society is a phenomenon which took matter during the French Revolution, where the entire heritage, especially of museums, should be considered as a public possession of all, in order to disseminate knowledge to all. In the Albanian context, the history to this heritage and the awareness took place in other circumstances, given the history and various developments in Albania. Given such circumstances, our analysis will be focused on the historical development and attention to national heritage, which was propagated at the same time as raising and awareness of missing values. These values have been attempt in different ways and related and have also changed during years of totalitarian period and then with the change of the political system.The paper tries to bring an overview of holistic term of culture heritage including museum law interpretation as part of cultural heritage legislation.

scholarly journals Jødeforfølgelse Med Socialistisk Fortegn. Janina Katz’ Forfatterskab Mellem Polen Og Danmark Med Særligt Henblik På Romanen Putska

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-146
Author(s):  
Karin Wolgast
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

Abstract Introducing life and work of Janina Katz, the article undertakes an analysis and interpretation of her second novel, the autofictional Putska. Born on the second of March 1939, Katz belonged to a renowned Jewish family with numerous members, of whom, however, only her mother and she survived the Second World War. Their extraordinary family history may be traced in practically all of Katz’ writings, as can her Jewish cultural heritage. The novel Putska is no exception. Its composition, characters and the image it gives of life in Cracow are examined in order to make understandable the protagonist’s decision to exile herself from Poland and migrate to Denmark, much like the author herself. 1969, having fled from that revival of anti-Semite harassment which was launched by the political leadership of socialist Poland, Katz was granted asylum in Denmark, where she soon learned the language to a perfection which enabled her to unfold a widely acknowledged literary work which does not cease to speak of her unique life experience. Central perspectives on her life and work include migration, autobiography, Jewishness and social and cultural history of Poland.

scholarly journals Rediscovery of Emotion Coaching

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Zhao Bo
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Emotion Coaching ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Feng Menglong ◽  
Late Ming ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Behaviour ◽  
The Mind

The theory of Emotion Coaching was put forward by Feng Menglong in Late-Ming Dynasty. Since Mid-Ming, the cognition of Ch’ing (emotion) has gone through three phases: rediscovery, development, and explanation on the level of the mind. Deeply influenced by Yangming, the theory of Emotion Coaching focuses neither on Ch’ing (emotion) nor on Li (justice) but the balance of the two. That “Ch’ing (emotion) is the basis of Li (justice) and Li (justice) is the criterion of Ch’ing (emotion)” is taken as the tenet of the theory, which means that Ch’ing (emotion) gives rise to moral behaviour and Li (justice) is the standard. The book The History of Ch’ing (《情史》) fully reflects the theory. Separating emotion and desire, Li (justice) is different from Li (rite). The former is based on human nature. Justice and destiny are the two important principles, rather than the political purposes which infuse the latter. The theory of Emotion Coaching is also reflected in the collection of short novels San Yen (“三言”). In the novel, the details of emotion are fantastic, trying to make sense of emotional varieties. Affective and wanton behaviour are shown differently in order to illustrate the discrepancy between emotion and desire. Justice and destiny are also emphasized. Chiang Hsingge Regained His Pearl Shirt (《蒋兴 哥重会珍珠衫) serves as an example here.

The Political Economy of Burke&s Analysis of the French Revolution

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Single Structure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.

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