Bohemian Rhapsodist: Antonín Dvořák's Píseň bohatýrská and the Historiography of Czech Music

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Campo-Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Program Music ◽  
Symphonic Poem ◽  
Tone Poems ◽  
Czech Music ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Discourses

Standard histories of Antonín Dvořák's life have largely ignored his output in the field of the symphonic poem, especially his final work in the genre, Píseň bohatýrská (Heroic Song). Composed in 1897 after four other tone poems explicitly based on poems by the Czech writer and ethnographer Karel Jaromír Erben, this piece features a much more abstract program and depicts the life, travails, and ultimate victory of a Slavonic bardic hero, assumed by many to be the composer himself. It premiered in late 1898 and early 1899 in Vienna and Prague, respectively, inviting mostly favorable reviews and performances in many other European cities before sliding into obscurity after the turn of the twentieth century. I situate Píseň bohatýrská in both the context of Dvořák's larger output and the critical discourses of the late nineteenth century, using it as a focal point to examine not only Dvořák's mythologized image as a composer at the fin de siècle, but the history of the symphonic poem, the politics of the Vienna-Prague critical axis, and the hardening of critical orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Through an in-depth study of Píseň bohatýrská's reception, I reveal a picture of Dvořák at once familiar and unfamiliar: as the naive, spontaneously creative absolute musician at odds, in the eyes of the critics, with the unfamiliar territory of the symphonic poem, and as a specifically Czech musician who was nevertheless placed in the same masculinized, Germanocentric composer-hero lineage of genius as Beethoven and Liszt. Nevertheless, the understanding of Dvořák as absolute Czech musician par excellence ultimately triumphed, weathering the assaults of his program music to survive into the present. This article provides a new understanding of the complexity of Dvořák's image near the end of his life, inviting a reconsideration of the composer.

Gay Affections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gay Identities

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.

Concepts of race in the Historicography of northeast Africa

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Physical Anthropology ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.

Reconstruction of the hydrologic history of a shallow Patagonian steppe lake during the past 700 yr, using chemical, geologic, and biological proxies

2017 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Coviaga ◽  
Andrea Rizzo ◽  
Patricia Pérez ◽  
Romina Daga ◽  
Daniel Poiré ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
High Salinity ◽  
Southern Annular Mode ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lake Basin ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Lake Level ◽  
Moderate Salinity ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe limnological conditions during the past 700 yr were reconstructed based on multiproxy analysis of a short sedimentary sequence from El Toro Lake (~40°S, 70°W). Mineralogical and geochemical features, as well as ostracods and chironomids, record hydrologic changes in the El Toro Lake basin. The ostracod Limnocythere rionegroensis var. 1, a reliable indicator of high salinity, and Eucypris fontana, a euryhaline species with preferences for moderate-salinity waters, are studied as paleolimnological proxies. The chironomid fauna indicates less saline conditions in the mid-twentieth century. These salinity changes are interpreted in terms of negative–positive hydrologic balance. High lake level and low salinity between AD 1500 and 1700 match with the wetter and colder climate during the second pulse of the Little Ice Age in northern Patagonia. High-salinity conditions occurred during the late nineteenth century, corresponding to the driest period during the past 400 yr in northeastern Patagonia. An increase in the precipitation around the middle of the twentieth century, in contrast to the records from the Chilean side of the mountains, correlates with a positive phase of the Southern Annular Mode. This is associated, in turn, with a strengthening, poleward shift of the midlatitude westerlies, possibly enhancing easterly moist air flows into central-north Patagonia.

“It Is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation’s Literature”

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Karin L. Hooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Literary Histories

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

The Project for a New Anglo Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Constituent Elements

This chapter sketches a synoptic intellectual history of the attempt to unify the constituent elements of the “Anglo-world” into a single globe-spanning community, and to harness its purported world-historical potential as an agent of order and justice. Since the late nineteenth century numerous commentators have preached the benefits of unity, though they have often disagreed on the institutional form it should assume. These are projects for the creation of a new Anglo century. The first two sections of the chapter explore overlapping elements of the fin de siècle Anglo-world discourse. The third section traces the echoes of debates over the future relationship between the empire and the United States through the twentieth century, discussing the interlacing articulation of imperial-commonwealth, Anglo-American, democratic unionist, and world federalist projects. The final section discusses contemporary accounts of Anglo-world supremacy.

Introduction: Modernism, Time Machines and the Defamiliarisation of Time

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Charles M. Tung
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reference Frames ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Pivot Point ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
History Of ◽  
Time Machines ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Function

This introduction returns to modernism’s incipient moments as the “Jonbar hinge” or pivot point for an alternative history of the period’s well-known time fixation. Using Lefebvre to reconsider aestheticism and impressionism in light of multiplicity rather than ephemerality, this new time-story expands the cultural significance and function of Wells’s foundational trope of the time machine to show how twentieth-century culture was defined not just by a Bergsonian repudiation of the clock but also by a proliferation of clocks. The rise of the time-travel trope, from the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, can be reconsidered not only as a symptom of the “eternal present” of late capitalism or our lost sense of history, but also as a component in a larger network that produces heterochrony—time’s multiple rates, scales, and reference frames. Our current political desire to revise history and envision other histories in contemporary discourses connects to the century-wide imaginative contestation of historical progress and the earlier openness to history’s irregular rhythms, its variety of scales, and its divarication of branches.

Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-history of Climate Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
J.R. Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Climate Fiction ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Global Heating

This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

Narrative histories in mycology and the legacy of George Edward Massee (1845–1917)

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
Nathan E. C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
University Education ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Mycological Society ◽  
Senior Member ◽  
Modern School ◽  
History Of

Mycology is a relatively small and young discipline that has yet to achieve the institutional presence of similar disciplines such as botany and zoology. Because of this, mycological histories are often written by practitioners aiming to establish a narrative of professionalization that confirms mycology as a scientific discipline instead of a natural history pursuit. George Edward Massee (1845–1917) was one of the foremost mycologists of the late nineteenth century, achieving the top position in the field as Principal Assistant (Cryptogams) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and publishing over 250 books and articles. Providing a link between the great Victorian mycologists Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1825–1914) and the Revd Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803–1889) and the more modern school that included the likes of Elsie Maud Wakefield (1886–1972), he achieved this position without a university education. However, since his death, his achievements have been subject to multiple negative assessments and, as a result, he has become increasingly obscured in the history of British mycology. The majority of these unfavourable appraisals originated from the publications of Dr John Ramsbottom (1885–1974), a mycologist and historian who was a key member of the British Mycological Society and a founding member of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History. These articles were published across the first half of the twentieth century, and Ramsbottom's works have since become standard texts in both the biography of Massee and the history of British mycology. Here I question the validity of the substance of Ramsbottom's claims against Massee, given the circumstances under which Ramsbottom's articles were written and the relationship between Massee and the fledgling British Mycological Society, initially run by Carleton Rea (1861–1946) and of which Ramsbottom was a senior member. I examine wider reasons for such strong criticism of Massee and explore the professional differences and relationships between Massee and Ramsbottom, placing the analysis firmly in the context of changing scientific practice occurring in the early twentieth century.

Beautiful Babies

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-26
Author(s):  
Irene Stroud
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
Agricultural Fairs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

Baby shows and baby contests in the late nineteenth century United States, beginning as a form of entertainment at agricultural fairs, were co-opted in the early twentieth century as a public relations vehicle for the eugenics movement. This article connects this history of display of the infant body with white Protestant practices of bodily display in infant baptism as represented etiquette manuals, women's magazines, and works of art. The author argues that infants became unwitting participants in practices of display that marked them as members of affluent white society.

“Whether They Promised Each Other Some Thing Is Difficult to Work Out”: The Complicated History of Marriage in Uganda

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Marriage And Divorce ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
History Of Marriage

Abstract:Marriage cases discussed by Catholic missionaries in Uganda at the turn of the twentieth century showcase considerable diversity in relationships between women and men. While these cases reflect the turbulence of the late nineteenth century, the history of marriage and divorce in the region since around 700 CE demonstrates that diversity in marital arrangements was a long-standing phenomenon. This article sets out the history of aspects of marriage and divorce in Buganda, Bugwere, Busoga, and Bushana, and their ancestral communities to show how women and men conceptualized their domestic relationships and adapted them as they dealt with political and social change.

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