“Motherwork”

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Jean T. Corey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
The Bible ◽  
To Come ◽  
Interpretive Strategies

Born in 1825, a free African American in Baltimore, Maryland, author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper devoted her life to the struggle for freedom. An abolitionist, and suffragist, the Bible figured prominently in Harper’s poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches. This essay considers how Harper’s poetry particularly challenged her nineteenth century reader to engage in more meaningful biblical interpretive strategies. Anticipating twentieth century Womanist interpretations, Harper disrupts and revises interpretive strategies that had been used to read against the biblical narrative’s message of liberation. Rereading commonly known texts with a different perspective or highlighting lesser known biblical stories, Harper’s biblical interpretations give voice to the voiceless women in the biblical text. Whether writing about women found in the biblical text or women in her own nineteenth century context, Harper’s poetry testifies to the mothers and “othermothers” who have struggled to ensure the dignity and rights of all people, in their own generations, as well as for generations to come.

“Not Another ‘Poetess’”: Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Lootens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Crisis Intervention ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Nineteenth Century Poetry

This chapter examines struggles to define relations between “Victorian femininity” and racialized Poetess reception, focusing in particular on early, explicitly racialized meditations on the loss of African American Poetess figures. Drawing on foundational Second Wave feminist texts such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Cora Kaplan's Salt and Bitter and Good, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, Erlene Stetson's Black Sister, and Cheryl Walker's Nightingale's Burden, the chapter investigates how early strains in Second Wave thinking came to define feminist criticism itself as a politicized mode of crisis intervention. It also considers how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper came to be barred, explicitly, from the category of “poetess” and concludes with a reading of Alice Walker's 1976 Poetess novel Meridian.

The Bible and Popular Christianity in Modern China

2021 ◽  
pp. 574-590
Author(s):  
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee ◽  
Christie Chui-Shan Chow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Bible Reading

This essay investigates the influential role that the Bible played in the sphere of Chinese popular Christianity. It explores the widespread use of the Bible among the lay populace who were traditionally excluded from the concerns and pursuits of Chinese Christian elites in cosmopolitan cities. Beginning with an overview of the cultural influence of the Bible in the mid-nineteenth century, this study argues that the liberating power of the Word was leveraged by peasant converts looking for new cosmologies and norms to change society. The twentieth century witnessed multiple levels of direct engagement with biblical texts, unmediated by foreign missionaries, among Chinese evangelists and congregants. Some drew on new biblical inspirations to found independent churches and sectarian groups, and some relied on the practice of bibliomancy to seek guidance in times of chaos. These examples offer complex view of the symbiosis between Bible reading and conversion in Chinese popular Christianity.

Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-50
Author(s):  
Michelle C. Neely
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Human Waste ◽  
Material Recycling ◽  
Ecological Vision ◽  
Lucille Clifton ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Common Practices

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in the nineteenth century, organic material recycling first emerged as a scientific principle during the antebellum period. Whitman’s documented journalistic and poetic interest in “compost” has led scholars to elevate the once-overlooked Whitman into the ecopoetic pantheon. Chapter one challenges this increasingly standard reading by placing Whitman’s interest in compost and organic recycling alongside his even more famous poetic investment in an indiscriminate, “omnivorous” consumption. Compost emerges as the twin of appetite in Whitman’s poetic environment, which reveals how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static, and therefore nonegalitarian and anti-ecological vision of community. The last part of the chapter explores resistance to this paradigm in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a twentieth-century African American poet self-consciously rewriting Whitman’s vision of democratic and environmental community. Ultimately, chapter one suggests that while Clifton resists the dream of cyclical, effortless material recycling and consequence-free consumption, it is nineteenth-century Whitman’s fantasy of the earth endlessly recycling and renewing human waste that remains more characteristic of contemporary U.S. life.

The Quaker Renaissance and Liberal Quakerism in Britain, 1895–1930

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-92
Author(s):  
Joanna Dales
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Liberal Theology ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Educational Initiatives ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Wrath Of God

Abstract Many Quakers who reached maturity towards the end of the nineteenth century found that their parents’ religion had lost its connection with reality. New discoveries in science and biblical research called for new approaches to Christian faith. Evangelical beliefs dominant among nineteenth-century Quakers were now found wanting, especially those emphasising the supreme authority of the Bible and doctrines of atonement whereby the wrath of God is appeased through the blood of Christ. Liberal Quakers sought a renewed sense of reality in their faith through recovering the vision of the first Quakers with their sense of the Light of God within each person. They also borrowed from mainstream liberal theology new attitudes to God, nature and service to society. The ensuing Quaker Renaissance found its voice at the Manchester Conference of 1895, and the educational initiatives which followed gave to British Quakerism an active faith fit for the testing reality of the twentieth century.

Traces of historical infinitive in English dialects and their Celtic connections

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-308
Author(s):  
JUHANI KLEMOLA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Verbal Noun ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Base Form ◽  
West Midlands ◽  
Celtic Languages ◽  
To Come

A number of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century dialect descriptions refer to an unusual adverb + infinitive construction in southwestern and west Midlands dialects of English. The construction is most often reported in the form of a formulaic phrase away to go, meaning ‘away he went’, though it is also found with a range of other adverbs. In addition, the same dialects also make use of a possibly related imperative construction, consisting of a preposition or adverb and a to-infinitive, as in out to come! ‘Come out!’ and a negative imperative construction consisting of the negator not and the base form of the verb, as in Not put no sugar in!. These construction types appear to be marginal at best in earlier varieties of English, whereas comparable constructions with the verbal noun are a well-established feature of especially British Celtic languages (i.e. Welsh, Breton, and Cornish). In this article I argue that transfer from the British Celtic languages offers a possible explanation for the use of these constructions in the traditional southwestern and west Midlands dialects of English.

Writing and Reading about Death

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-244
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The North ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
Basel Mission

This chapter considers the transformation from a culture of speaking about death to one which included writing and reading about death. It spotlights the final quarter of the nineteenth century, from the creation of the British Crown Colony of the Gold Coast in 1874 to its expansion with the formal incorporation of Asante and the savanna hinterland to the north in 1901–2. The chapter focuses on literacy and print culture as they developed on the Gold Coast littoral, a process which would extend into Asante and beyond only in the twentieth century. This print culture comprised both vernacular African languages and, with the departure of the Dutch in 1872, the language of the remaining colonizing power: English. The former was particularly associated with the Basel Mission, whose European and African agents pioneered the transcription of Ga and Twi as written languages and produced the first vernacular printed texts: prayer books, primers, dictionaries, the gospels and, by the 1860s to 1870s, compete translations of the Bible. The Bible, of course, has a great deal to say about mortality and the ends of life, however, the chapter concentrates on a different, secular medium of entextualized discourses about death: newspapers, which, as in Europe, 'accorded mortality new openings.'

Herbert Spencer and the Spectre of Comte

1967 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney Eisen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
To Come ◽  
Century Science ◽  
George Sarton

“It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion.The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done.

Gardening in the Apocalypse

2020 ◽  
pp. 389-517
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Robert Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
To Come

The “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago struck many Americans as a hopeful glimmer of the happy cities to come, but soon, visions of even happier utopian suburbs reclaimed dominance, asserting the need for “A Cityless and Countryless World.” When Bellamy produced his sequel to Looking Backward, it promised a future of commuting by motorcar and personal aircraft to and from cottages in garden suburbs. In different ways, influential reformers and architects such as Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright fed their readings of utopian literature into influential designs for destroying old cities and achieving suburban bliss. The last great nineteenth-century utopian visionary was also the greatest science-fiction author of the early twentieth century: H. G. Wells. He, perhaps more than any other writer, carried forward the Victorian call to abandon Babylon to new heights and fresh audiences, prophesying dreadful apocalypse, and luminously modern gardens to follow.

Portrait of a Nineteenth-Century Iranian Statesman: The Life and Times of Grand Vizier Amīn Ud-Dawlah, 1844–1904

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-351
Author(s):  
Hafez Farmayan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
British Government ◽  
The South ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
To Come ◽  
Temporary Control

In 1898, with Great Britain and Russia vying for political and economic dominance of Iran, Grand Vizier Mīrzā Alī Khān Amīn ud-Dawlah set in motion a cycle of events that, during the early part of the twentieth century, led to the downfall of the Qājārs, a dynasty he had spent his entire professional career serving. What initiated this cycle was the negotiation for a loan from Great Britain, sought partially for governmental expenses but mostly to finance a trip by the Shah to Europe. To obtain this loan, Amīn ud-Dawlah mortgaged the revenues of Iran's two most important customs houses in the south (Bushehr and Kermanshah), and also allowed those two departments to come under the control and administration of the British-owned Imperial Bank of Persia. In return for these astonishing concessions, the Bank advanced £50,000 to Grand Vizier Amin ud-Dawlah for emergency expenditures. The remainder, a mere £200,000, was to be paid upon completion of negotiations with the British Government. British bankers and diplomats in Tehran, aware of the sensitivity of the Grand Vizier's extraordinary decision, urged London to complete the negotiations as soon as possible. In the view of British representatives in Tehran this was imperative if temporary control of the customs houses was to become “a permanent institution.” However, negotiations dragged on long enough to give Russia and the Grand Vizier's rivals a chance to successfully frustrate the negotiations. Failure to obtain this British loan forced Grand Vizier Amīn ud-Dawlah to resign.

scholarly journals Fanthorp Inn State Historical Park (41GM79), Grimes County, Texas: Archeological Excavations, 1983-1989

1998 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Septic System ◽  
Parking Lot ◽  
Communication Center ◽  
Architectural Restoration ◽  
Tableware Glass

This report summarizes archeological investigations conducted by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department at Fanthorp Inn State Historical Park from 1983 to 1989. This work was necessary to accompany architectural restoration of the inn as it appeared during the period between 1850 and 1867. Since restoration was completed, Fanthorp Inn State Historical Park in Anderson, Grimes County, has been run as an interpretive site representing a transportation and communication center of the mid-nineteenth century. The archeological excavations were intended to evaluate the areas impacted by the architectural restoration and to determine the appearance of the grounds during the mid-nineteenth century. Attempts were made to locate and identify several outbuildings shown on an 1850 map of the inn, but only the kitchen was located in this manner. Also, areas of ground disturbance such as the locations of the septic system and utility trenches were investigated archeologically. As currently configured, the grounds are made up of the L-shaped inn building, a barn that houses restrooms and a display, a parking lot, fences and paths, the kitchen as represented by a stabilized foundation, and one cistern that has been rebuilt to its original appearance. This report, by Prewitt and Associates, Inc., summarizes the excavations from 1983 through 1989 and provides analyses of diagnostic artifacts (i.e., bottles and jars, pressed glass, other tableware glass, lamp chimney rim sherds, flaked glass, transfer-printed ceramics, marked ceramics, smoking pipes, marked spoons, coins, arms and ammunition, dolls, marbles, and artifacts believed to be associated with African American religious practices). In general, the assemblage reflects a typical nineteenth- and twentieth century site in southeastern Texas.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document