“She Must Be a Rare One”: Aspasia, Corinne, and the Improvisatrice Tradition

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Ianetta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Rhetorical Instruction ◽  
Foreign Woman

Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction.

The Soviet Project of the 1930s to Found a “World Literature” and British Literary Internationalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-425
Author(s):  
Katerina Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Network ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Georg Lukács

Abstract A major lacuna in Pascale Casanova’s account of world literature in her World Republic of Letters is the Soviet venture into establishing a “world literature” (mirovaia literatura) to be centered not in Paris but in Moscow. This aim was most actively pursued between the wars, when many writers were implicated in its international network. This moment in literary history provides a missing link in the progression from the more elitist world literature as conceived by Goethe and others in the early nineteenth century to world literature in our postcolonialist present and era of globalization. This article outlines the networks that sought to foster such a world literature and the main aesthetic controversies within the movement. In particular, the article looks at the efforts of such official spokesmen as Andrei Zhdanov, Karl Radek, and Georg Lukács to proscribe “bourgeois” modernism. It takes members of the British Writers’ International and their associated journals the Left Review and New Writing as case studies in the interplay between Moscow as putative “metropole” and the “periphery.”

scholarly journals Ghost Writers: Radcliffiana and the Russian Gothic Wave

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-171
Author(s):  
Katherine Bowers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Russian Translation ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Book Market ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Insight Into

Ann Radcliffe’s novels were extremely popular in early nineteenth-century Russia. Publication of her work in Russian translation propelled the so-called gothic wave of 1800-10. Yet, many of the works Radcliffe was known for in Russia were not written by her; rather, they were works by others that were attributed to Radcliffe. This article traces the publication and translation histories of Radcliffiana on the Russian book market of 1800-20. Building on JoEllen DeLucia’s concept of a “corporate Radcliffe” in the anglophone world, this article proposes a Russian corporate Radcliffe. Identifying, classifying, and analysing the provenance of Russian corporate Radcliffe works reveals insight into the transnational circulation of texts and the role of copyright law within it, the nature of the early nineteenth-century Russian book market, the rise of popular reading and advertising in Russia, and the gendered nature of critical discourse at this time. The Russian corporate Radcliffe assures the legacy and influence of Radcliffe in later Russian literature and culture, although a Radcliffe that represents much more than just the English author. Exploring the Russian corporate Radcliffe expands our understanding of early nineteenth-century Russian literary history through specific case studies that demonstrate the significant role played by both women writers and translation, an aspect of this history that is often overlooked.

scholarly journals THE HISTORY OF A CALENDAR AS A CUMULATIVE TEXT OF MASS MEDIA IN THE ETHNIC CULTURE OF GERMANY

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 976-981
Author(s):  
U.A. Nebesnyuk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Ethnic Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
History Of

The article presents the analysis of composition, forms and functions of a calendar as a cumulative text of mass media in the ethnic culture of Germany from the mid-fifteenth until the early nineteenth century. It was revealed that, in connection with the growing role of narrative entertainment part since the 10s of the nineteenth century and the politicization of social consciousness during the great French Revolution, the calendar as a truly national medium of information has been undergone literarization, having lost its original meaning. Calendar stories have formed an independent literary genre which had received the name «Kalendergeschichte» in German tradition.

The Ballad Revival and the Rise of Literary History

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
David Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

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.

The Armature of the American Novel: The Antebellum Sketch and Tale in Literary History

2016 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-191
Author(s):  
Lydia G. Fash
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Printing Technology ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Literary Market

This essay calls attention to the genre of the sketch, which played a critical role in the early nineteenth-century US literary market. Later when developments in printing technology made it easier to publish longer works, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe used the sketch as the basis for hugely important mid-century novels.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Gerard Lee McKeever
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Environmental Condition ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This introduction clarifies the book’s contribution to the study of Scottish Romanticism, Enlightenment and improvement. Improvement, it argues, was sufficiently important as a modality, trope and environmental condition to be viewed plausibly as a defining feature of literary production in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland. The introduction includes a working genealogy of improvement and a survey of the motley field of scholarship on the topic. A section on the national implications of improvement in the Scottish context is next, followed by more detail on the book’s dialectical approach. There is then an analysis of the category of Scottish Romanticism as it has been treated elsewhere and as it is modified by the book’s own case studies, summaries of which form the final section.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

2021 ◽  
Vol 155 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
SJ Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
Martin Delany ◽  
Military Uniform ◽  
The Military

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

The Eighteenth-Century Ballet-Pantomime and Modern Mime

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43
Author(s):  
Edward Nye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Lincoln College ◽  
As If

Histories of mime largely overlook one of the most remarkable theatrical phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the ballet-pantomime. In contrast, it is widely discussed in dance history circles, as if there were a tacit understanding that only one half of this hyphenated art mattered: the ballet rather than the pantomime. This article explores the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices. Through the works of Noverre particularly (since Decroux declares himself an admirer), but with reference also to other famous and less famous eighteenth-century choreographers and dancers, Edward Nye discusses five aspects of mime: use of the body, mime and dance, mime and language, objective and subjective mime, and pedagogy. He finds differences as well as similarities between modern and eighteenth-century mime, but overall argues that there is no reason to exclude the ballet-pantomime from histories of mime. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000), and of dance, in Danse et littérature; sur quel pied danser? (ed., Rodopi, 2003).

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