scholarly journals “Come brother Opie!”

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-162
Author(s):  
Joe Bray

Joe Bray, “‘Come brother Opie!’: Amelia Opie and the Courtroom” (pp. 137–162) This essay examines how Amelia Opie’s lifelong fascination with the human drama of the courtroom is reflected in her fiction, specifically in her tales that revolve around trial scenes. Focusing on three examples in particular, “Henry Woodville” (1818), “The Robber” (1806), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1813), it argues that Opie’s fictional courtrooms encourage an emotional engagement on the part of both characters and narrators, which in turn can be extended to that of the reader. In the case of “The Mysterious Stranger,” a character is on figurative trial throughout, with both narrator and reader frequently in the dark as to her motives. As a result, judgment is both hazardous and uncertain. Through a sympathetic representation of the passions and vicissitudes experienced by all those in the courtroom context, whether real or metaphorical, Opie’s fiction develops a model of readerly participation that adds a new, affective dimension to traditional accounts of the relationship between early-nineteenth-century literature and the law.

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Vander biesen

Abstract Starting from the nineteenth century descriptive literatures on Zanzibar by authors such as Sir Richard Burton and Charles Guillain, and Salima bint Said-Ruete's autobiography, we can draw a rather detailed picture of the relationship between the different social layers, cultures and genders on Zanzibar. Describing and differentiating the complexity of Zanzibar society in the nineteenth century is the main aim of this paper. The focus is on clothing in order to sketch the social organization of the society and to highlight the cultural relations between the different groups in Zanzibar. The evidence obtained from the description of clothing is used as an eye-opener for the Zanzibar society and this evidence is supported by nineteenth century literature and photography on Zanzibar.


Author(s):  
David Matthews

This chapter describes the rediscovery and reinvention of the ballad in the 1760s and 1770s, tracing the later impact of the resultant conception of the Middle Ages on nineteenth-century literature and scholarship. The chapter traces the way in which a notion of the ‘Gothic’ was differentiated, in the early nineteenth century, from the ‘medieval’ (a word newly coined around 1817) and goes on to look at the way in which the early beginnings of English literary history resulted from the antiquarian researches of the eighteenth century. It concludes with reflections on the extent to which it can be said there was truly a revival of the ballad, and posits that there was instead a revaluation something already there, with a new conferral of prestige.


Author(s):  
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

In ‘Gruesome models: European Displays of Natural History and Anatomy and Nineteenth-Century Literature’ Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores the process in which from the second half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, medical museums opened their doors throughout Europe and anatomical models circulated between Italy, Germany, France and England, serving to educate professional medical audiences and thrilling lay audiences keen on freaks and fairs. The chapter argues that the popularisation of anatomy and the circulation of anatomical models and modellers, exhibitions and anatomists throughout Europe was reflected in nineteenth-century literature, from Gothic novels to realistic narratives and even children’s fiction. Looking at the impact of the material culture of medicine upon the literary field, Talairach-Vielmas examines the relationship between literature and the European anatomical culture by exploring nineteenth-century narratives from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in the first decades of the nineteenth-century to Charles Dickens’s fiction in the 1860s, analysing novels alongside travel guides and journal articles which demonstrate how the specific example of anatomy influenced the literary culture.


Slavic Review ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 440-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Reyfman

Iurii Lotman authored nearly forty books and articles about Aleksandr Pushkin's works, life, and personality; there is little doubt, therefore, that the poet was central to Lotman's scholarly interests. Nonetheless, Lotman turned to Pushkin's legacy relatively late in his scholarly career: while his first article was published in 1949, his first article on Pushkin appeared only in 1960. Both Lotman's kandidatskaia and doktorskaia dissertations were devoted to far more marginal figures and issues of Russian literary development: the former to Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Karamzin, and the latter to early nineteenth-century literature.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Mark Ittensohn

The following paper presents the frame tale as a particular genre of early-nineteenth-century literature that openly negotiated the late Romantic period's displaced correspondence between imaginative production and the economic market. The frame tale is best described as a type of narrative fiction that consists of a frame story (such as a storytelling session) in which multiple sub-narratives in a network of reciprocal exchange are embedded. By discussing two frame tales by the Scottish author James Hogg, the following analysis will show how the resurgence of this particular genre in the early nineteenth century is indicative of Romantic literature's active interest in discussing the relations between literary and economic signification. In this reading, the frame tale emerges as a prime indicator of Romanticism's ghostly link between literature and the marketplace. In both The Queen's Wake (1813/1819) and the Three Perils of Man (1822), Hogg conjures intricate fictional spaces of reciprocity as mirrors of the print market in which these texts were themselves published. By means of a mise-en-abyme of narrative exchange, Hogg's frame tales bridge the gap between literature and economics in a way that illuminates both the economics of literature and the literariness of economy in the early nineteenth century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


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