French Folk Songs and the Invention of History

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindhumathi Revuluri
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
History Writing ◽  
French Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A favorite project of scholars in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France was to collect folk songs from various French provinces and to add new harmonic accompaniments before publishing them. This folk-song project, like so many others, has obvious nationalist undertones: gathering songs from every French province and celebrating an essential and enduring French spirit. Yet the nuances of this project and its broader context suggest a diverse set of concerns. An examination of the rhetoric around folk-song collection shows how French scholars of the period conflated history and geography: they made the provinces the place of history. Collecting songs from the provinces thus became a way of recovering France's past. Paired with contemporary discussions of musical progress and especially those related to harmony, the addition of piano accompaniments to monophonic songs now reads as a form of history writing. In this article, I argue that French music scholars of the fin de siècle acted out their preferred narratives of music history through folk-song harmonizations. What seemed like a unanimously motivated nationalist project actually reveals the development and contestation of the discipline of music history.

Inconclusions

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-227
Author(s):  
Koenraad Claes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Victorian Age

This chapter provides a summary of the argument of the book and of the history developed therein of the little magazine genre in Britain from 1850 (the Germ) to 1901 (the folding of the Page). A glance ahead at the coming Edwardian interlude and the later modernist period indicates that early-twentieth-century titles such as Rhythm (1911–13), BLAST (1914–15) and the Little Review (1914–29) were faced by the same challenges as their Victorian predecessors. As is shown, some of the most famous modernist detractors of the Victorian age were actually aware that their journals were part of the legacy of the Fin-de-Siècle periodicals treated in this book, even though they often disowned this connection.

Victorian Drydown and Sillage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter considers the reception of the Victorian perfumed legacy by examining two contrasting early twentieth-century literary responses to perfume and decadence by Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie. Woolf had little personal contact with the culture of decadence, her diary displaying her puritanism and distrust of perfume. Later in life her novel Flush (1933) allows her a rapprochement with Victorian literature and smell, while her memoirs show her becoming more accommodating of her sensory self. In contrast, Mackenzie had a relaxed attitude towards Victorian decadence, perfume, and smell, and enjoyed the literature of the fin de siècle. This liberal response is expressed in his autobiography, various essays, and his two most important early novels Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913–14), where his protagonists reveal his skill as an ‘aromancer’, adept at using scented memories and impressions to underscore the key moments and experiences in an individual’s life.

‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Drug Induced ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Dead

This chapter considers the ‘internal visions’ conjured up during reading in tandem with hallucinatory effects brought on by intoxication, particularly in the context of fin-de-siècle culture. Its sources range from the high art of the Aesthetes, Symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and in the archives of the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards. These visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust; in each case such practices conjure up tantalising images of an exotic East. The longevity of these tantalising tropes – particularly of seductive dreams that verge between Orientalist fantasy and nightmare – are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

Occultism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Aleister Crowley ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter explores the use of drugs in the occult milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is fin de siècle occultism. While it examines the significance of drug use in the life and work of key figures such as W. B. Yeats, Helena Blavatsky, and Aleister Crowley, it also looks at little-known but important occultists such as Paschal Beverly Randolph and Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, as well as organizations such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Order of the Golden Dawn. There is also some analysis of temperance discourses within Theosophy and particularly Spiritualism. Finally, there is an overview of drug use in post-Crowleyan Thelemic thought later in the twentieth century.

Histories of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century immigration and our time

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ranabir Samaddar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adult Women ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Protection Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Women Trafficking ◽  
Political Understanding

Recent studies on welfare state and schemes suggest a different way of understanding modern governance in which the study of the nation is not at the centre of political understanding. Instead, of significance in such studies is the inadequately explored history of governing a mobile, unruly world of population flows. These works have given us a sense of the hidden histories of conflicts, desperate survivals, and new and old networks. Studies of hunger in the nineteenth century, of itinerant movements, transportations of coolies, spread of famines, shipping of children and adult women, trafficking in sex and labour, and pieces of welfare legislation to cope with this great infamy tell us how actually we have arrived at our own time of subject formation. This is certainly different from conventional nation-centred histories. Working within this new strand of history writing, labour historians have tried to recognise the political significance of labour migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their works suggest a different way of writing the history of the nation form in the last two centuries, where the extra-nationalist narrative of mobile labour constitutes a different universe. Through all these studies two issues have come closer as marks of modern time – on one hand mixed up, messy, population flows, provoking desperate governmental responses, on the other hand innovations at a furious pace in humanitarian methods, functions, institutions and principles. Modern humanitarianism had to combine the old techniques with new ones of care, protection, information gathering, interference, intervention and invention of a skewed theory of sovereignty, a one-sided theory of responsibility, and the gigantic humanitarian machines which would be likened to the transnational corporations (TNCs). In practical terms this means today managing the societies which produce the obdurate refugees and migrants to stop them from leaving the shores, to keep them within the national territorial confines, and eventually to manage societies in ‘an enlightened way’. Managing moving population groups became the deus ex machina of modern governmentality. This will not be a straightforward history, as national, gender-related, race, and several other factors contributed to the making of a hugely heterogeneous labour market. The subjectivities produced in that process have contributed to the contentious history of our time.

scholarly journals Novák's Lucerna and the Historiographical Problem of "Czech Modernism"

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-112
Author(s):  
Brian Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Czech Music ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Stylistic Influences ◽  
The Aesthetic

The opera Lucerna (premièred 1923) by the Czech composer Vitězslav Novák demonstrates the problematic position of Czech music in the historiography of the early twentieth century, since neither "avant-garde" nor "antimodernist" suffice for it as stylistic labels. A leader of Czech modernism during the fin de siècle, Novák's music embodies the aesthetic crisis his generation faced after 1918. Lucerna's score reveals a complex negotiation of multiple stylistic influences, including impressionism, folklore, and Strauss, paralleling the Czech community's hesitant acceptance of international modernism in the early interwar period. The opera's lack-lustre finale echoes the contemporaneous return to Czech traditional values, using Smetana as an anachronistic model for modernist opera.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

A Historiographical Interlude

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Teubner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The ‘Historiographical Interlude’ presents a brief overview of the cultural, social, and political changes that occur between Augustine’s death in 430 CE and Boethius’ earliest theological writings (c.501 CE). When Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict are treated together in one unified analysis, several historiographical challenges emerge. This Interlude addresses several of these challenges and argues that trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship established some unfounded interpretive biases. In particular, this section will discuss the contributions of Adolf von Harnack and Henri Irénée Marrou, focusing on how they contributed, in diverse ways, to the neglect of sixth-century Italy as a significant geographical site in the development of the Augustinian tradition.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document