scholarly journals An Academic Edition of a Russian Gothic Novel

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxim Chernyshov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Artistic Quality

The book under review is an edition of the novel The Black Woman (1834) by the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gretsch, part of the academic series “Literary Monuments”. It was prepared for publication by E. V. Markasova: the edition is supported by an extensive scholarly apparatus, including two supplemental texts from the 1830s, two scholarly articles, notes on the text, a chronicle of Gretsch’s life and work, a bibliography, and a list of illustrations. The reviewer evaluates the scholarly work of Markasova and her colleagues higher than the artistic quality of the novel itself, which suffers from the imperfections characteristic of early experiments in popular fiction. The reviewer believes that the aesthetic context in which Gretsch’s Gothic novel is considered must include not only genre, but also the artistic movements of the epoch, especially Romanticism. The lack of attention to this issue leads to some doubtful and controversial assertions in the notes concerning literary trends in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the end of the review, the author comes to the conclusion that academic studies are currently experiencing heightened interest in the mystical and irrational in literature.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Dandy Socialism

Maska ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (185) ◽  
pp. 134-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lev Kreft
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Aesthetic Field ◽  
Young Hegelians ◽  
The Aesthetic

‘It was a dark and stormy night...’ with these words Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. ‘Le 13 décembre 1838, par une soirée pluvieuse et froid’ are the words with which Eugène Sue begins his novel The Mysteries of Paris, its narrative following a ‘conceptual’ introductory address to the reader. There are many more features connecting these two popular literary pieces of the Romantic period. In-between, a new genre emerged – the melodramatic social(ist) novel – together with new means of communication, i.e. the novel feuilleton that was printed in daily newspapers. This subtle form of censorship suggests that a genre believed to be melodramatically mediocre had an excessive aestheticopolitical attractiveness. Eugène Sue was a star writer of nineteenth century bestsellers novels–feuilletons during the period between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Afterwards he practically fell into oblivion and was barely mentioned in the company of ‘serious’ writers like Balzac and Hugo or Dickens and Thackeray, all of whom, however, took his allegedly mediocre melodramatic and popular narratives as cases to be followed. His temporary fame was confirmed by the response of Bruno Bauer’s group of young Hegelians, who found in Sue’s literary attractiveness a philosophical solution for all the mysteries and conflicts of the period. Marx’s criticism of their philosophical and political position in The Sacred Family includes a lengthy and thorough criticism of their ‘philosophical’ readings of the novel, of the novel itself, and of their and Sue’s understanding of the new bourgeois reality. Among other points, Sue’s alleged socialism is described with the help of a comparison between the police and the moral police. Can we, along with a re-establishment of the context of The Mysteries of Paris, leave behind the critique of ideology and the literary critique of popular and mass culture in order to bring back into the aesthetic field this melodramatic narrative of class society and to re-establish the politics of its aesthetics?

THE GHOST IN THE CLINIC: GOTHIC MEDICINE AND CURIOUS FICTION IN SAMUEL WARREN'SDIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meegan Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case History ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Case Histories ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Vision

IN 1856, WHEN MANY VICTORIAN PHYSICIANS WERE STRUGGLING TO DEFINE A MODEL OF CLINICAL MEDICINE, the reviewer of one collection of case histories voiced his dismay at the physician-author's preference for “dreadful incidents” and “cases exceptional and strange” (“Works” 473). Indeed, although physicians of the clinical era did not disguise their efforts to achieve a new kind of discourse, productive of a “realist” vision, few acknowledge how often the “clinical” case history of the nineteenth century also shares the romantic discourse of the Gothic, especially its interest in the supernatural and the unexplainable and its narrative aim of arousing suspense, horror, and astonishment in the reader. Literary critics have also focused primarily on the association of medical narrative with a realist literary discourse. Nineteenth-century physicians did campaign for the formal, objective, and professional clinical discourse that serves as their contribution to a realist aesthetic, in the process explicitly rejecting eighteenth-century medicine's fascination with “the curious” and its subterranean affiliation with the unknown, the unexplainable, and the subjective. But, as I show in this article, a discourse of “the curious,” allied with a Gothic literary aesthetic, stubbornly remained a critical element of many case histories, though it often presented under the mask of the more acceptable term, “interesting.” The discourse of Gothic romance in the case history provides a narrative frame that, unlike the essentially realist clinical discourse, could make sense of the physician's curious gaze, which had become nearly unrecognizable as a specifically medical vision. Indeed, a “curious” medical discourse haunts even case histories of the high clinical era, late in the century; and it energizes the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Samuel Warren's novelPassages from the Diary of a Late Physician–deplored in the quotation above–illuminates this tradition of “Gothic medicine” as it plays out in the nineteenth-century novel. This tradition, I argue, provides the novel with a powerful model of cultural contamination and conflict in its yoking of disparate discourses. Gothic medicine demonstrates the importance of clinical medicine to literary romance, and it cannot help but reveal the ghost of “the curious” in the clinic.

scholarly journals The reception of nineteenth-century Serbian salon music: Performer, audience and music critic perspectives

Muzikologija ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Marijana Kokanovic-Markovic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Work Analysis ◽  
Dynamic Relation ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Artistic Quality

The history of Salon Music can be traced through the tense, dynamic relation between the consumers of that kind of music (performers, listeners) and critics. In the early 1930s, and later even more, a designation ?salon style? started to appear in the reviews of the Salon Music. By that fact alone, it was implied that compositions, which were published as Salon Music, or were defined as such in reviews, corresponded to specific musical norms, which, on the other hand, evolved merely from recipient?s needs. In foreign and domestic press from the period, there are many negative epithets referring to Salon Music: ?empty, frivolous, coquette, false?. Nevertheless, aesthetic debates in music literature had no impact on Salon Music admirers. In this study, the focus of attention is on the reception of Serbian Salon Music of the nineteenth century within the context of the Central European cultural practice. Salon compositions were interpreted within the interactive relations among musical work-performers-audience-critics. The goal of musical work analysis was not to evaluate the artistic quality or non-quality of the Salon Music, in order to distinguish more or less successful music compositions. It is far more important to bear in mind that artistic quality with the Salon Music consumers of the time had no decisive role. Musical work analysis no longer seeks for aesthetical values in music facts, but for qualities and features that a piece of music must possess in order to fulfill its purpose and function.

Romancing the Interstitial

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-337
Author(s):  
Sheila Liming
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Way

Sheila Liming, “Romancing the Interstitial: Howe, Balzac, and Nineteenth-Century Legacies of Sexual Indeterminacy” (pp. 311–337) This essay links Julia Ward Howe’s infamous “lost” text, The Hermphrodite (first published in 2004), with Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), arguing that Howe rewrites Balzac’s figure of the “tragic hermaphrodite” with the intention of protesting nineteenth-century American assumptions regarding innate sexual difference. The Hermaphrodite tells the story of Laurence, a deeply contemplative, intelligent person whose sexual identity is disputed, but Howe never employs the term “hermaphrodite” outright. This situation encourages readers to judge Laurence’s hermaphroditism by his behavior and actions in the novel, not his biology, and this is furthermore consistent with the way the term “hermaphrodite” was used and understood by mid-nineteenth-century Americans. As such, this essay examines the claims that Howe makes about the social machinery of gender in The Hermaphrodite, arguing that while Laurence has much in common with Balzac’s Sarrasine, Howe uses her protagonist as a means of revising outdated arguments about biological “truth.” Howe’s Laurence revisits and updates nineteenth-century considerations of the aesthetic androgyne in the service of a modern, political agenda concerning sexual demarcation and difference.

Marcus Clarke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Mccann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Commercial Viability ◽  
Cultural Legitimacy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City ◽  
Natural Life

This chapter looks at Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1870–1872), which is considered as his enduring contribution to Australian literature and to a broader literature of empire. The peculiarly citational quality of the novel is barely intelligible without understanding the way in which Clarke came to situate himself in relationship to both colonial literary culture and to an emerging European canon. His acute sense of having to balance cultural legitimacy against commercial viability lends his work an unusual degree of self-consciousness in regard to the processes of commodification and the regimes of cultural capital that were having an enormous impact on the development of mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne, the city in which Clarke lived and worked. Ultimately, a novel like His Natural Life reflects the desire to reproduce the popular textual forms of the metropolis in the everyday experience of the colonies.

scholarly journals Thermometer screens and the geographies of uniformity in nineteenth-century meteorology

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Naylor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Uniform Pattern ◽  
Stevenson Screen ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Scientific Infrastructure ◽  
Comparability Of Results

By the 1860s a number of thermometer stands, screens and boxes were being used at public observatories and in private settings. The ultimate object of these humble pieces of scientific infrastructure was to protect the thermometers from precipitation and radiation. In response to concerns over the quality of designs and the comparability of results a trial of the various apparatuses was staged at Strathfield Turgiss, Hampshire, in 1868, and subsequent discussions were organized by Britain's Meteorological Society (from 1883 the Royal Meteorological Society). In an attempt to guarantee uniformity of exposure, the Society recommended the adoption of the Stevenson screen, a double-louvred box designed by Thomas Stevenson in 1866. It was promoted as an essential part of the Society's network of second-order and climatological stations across England. Despite the Meteorological Society's aim of overcoming the idiosyncrasies of geography through recourse to a uniform pattern screen, their chosen design ended up embodying a particular geography: the aesthetic and moral codes of the suburban domestic garden.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-166
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Henry James ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Italian Unification

The Conclusion focuses on the delicate balance between investment in Italy and disenchantment with the Risorgimento’s outcome in the period following official Italian unification in 1861. Late nineteenth-century writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee step back from Risorgimento politics to depoliticise Italy, returning it to the aesthetic domain; yet, an unsettling quality of resurgence, or risorgimento, lingers in the skeletal Juliana Bordereau of James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and the revived corpse Medea da Carpi of Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1887/1890). George Meredith’s post-unification Vittoria (1866), in particular, points to the conflicts that the creation of an Italian nation-state failed to resolve; these contests, the Risorgimento’s cultural remains, reveal the centrality of loss, dissent and struggle to the Risorgimento’s legacy. However, Italian politics also played an invigorating, energising role for nineteenth-century British literature and culture, enlivening political discourse, cultural production and literary experimentation through its oppositionalist character.

The ‘Wicked City’ Motif on the American Stage before the Civil War

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Frick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
National Myth ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Big City ◽  
The Status

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the characterization of the big city as evil incarnate – a veritable latter-day Sodom – had achieved the status of national myth in both the United States and Britain, and had become a popular theme for journalists, novelists, and playwrights alike. John Frick examines this phenomenon – what came to be known as the ‘wicked city motif’ – as it manifested itself on the antebellum American stage. Originating in the urbanization of the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the French feuilleton roman and coalescing in Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, the city mysteries narrative successfully negotiated the unstable border between the public and private spheres to examine the depravity and danger of the modern metropolis. Disseminated through populist politics, sensationalized journalism, popular fiction, and – the focus here – dramatic renderings, the apocalyptic vision of the modern city with its inexplicable and impenetrable secrets became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s. John Frick is Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches in the M.Litt. program at Mary Baldwin College. His most recent book, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

The Novel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Tate
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
British Culture

The nineteenth-century novel in English is frequently defined by a theological shape. Fiction was sometimes regarded with suspicion by Christian readers, particularly those shaped by the legacies of the Puritan tradition. Yet alternative understandings of the pervasive influence of evangelical culture emphasize a more complex relationship with the novel, even after the advent of the ‘Higher’ biblical criticism. The chapter builds on Callum Brown’s analysis of what he names the ‘salvation economy’: a matrix of evangelical sermons, hymnody, and popular narrative shaped British culture in the nineteenth century. Conversion, fundamental in evangelicalism, is also a frequent trope in popular fiction. The chapter examines the animating presence of Christian thought in novels by, for example, Charles Dickens, Mary Ward, Emma Jane Worboise, and the Brontë sisters. The chapter gives particular focus to George Eliot whose fiction challenges assumptions regarding the apparent binaries of faith and scepticism and sacred and profane.

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