Lafayette's Impossible Princess: On (Not) Making Literary History

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1077
Author(s):  
Nicholas Paige
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Evolution

The branch of literary history occupied with generic evolution customarily views masterworks as the drivers of formal change: their success causes later writers to follow their innovations. This article considers the case of the comtesse de Lafayette's La princesse de Clèves, which broke from received Aristotelian ideas on the use of history by focusing on an invented heroine; because the princess was invented, she blocked traditional reading strategies and allowed instead for readerly identification. It is tempting to conclude from this that the novel's innovations made it a harbinger of the future, an ancestor of the nineteenth-century novel. Yet writers of Lafayette's time did not follow her cue, and no trail leads from the princesse de Clèves to later fictive protagonists. Theories of literary evolution must take into account that in many cases there may be no reassuring causal relation between masterworks and broader literary practice.

François-René de Chateaubriand

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marie Roulin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Future ◽  
Benjamin Constant ◽  
New Literature ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Chateaubriand’s seminal debate with de Staël at the dawn of the nineteenth century around perceptions of literary history and the orientations of modern literature was largely focused on what aspects of this Enlightenment legacy should be retained or rejected. A contemporary of Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand was marked, like them, by the experience of the French Revolution. This sets him apart from the Romantics of the ‘battle ofHernani’ (1830), for whom the Revolution was a pre-existing narrative. For Chateaubriand’s generation the Revolution was crucial, posing ontological, political, and metaphysical questions—how could that ‘river of blood’ be crossed, to borrow one of his recurrent metaphors? What should the new literature be like, and for what type of society in revolutionized France? Chateaubriand’s Romanticism was first of all an answer to these questions, an elegiac adieu to a past forever lost and an uneasy questioning of the future.

Filling the Gap between Radishchev and the Decembrists

Slavic Review ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Raeff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Secret Societies ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Future ◽  
The One

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 888-906
Author(s):  
Laurie Langbauer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Future

This essay considers the poetry of the juvenile author Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), largely unstudied today but well known throughout the nineteenth century. Kirke White's work provides an example of the importance to juvenile writing of prolepsis—a trope that yokes immediacy to the future, employing a range of strategies including both anticipation and retrospection. Robert Southey's edition of Kirke White's Remains, coming on the heels of Southey and Joseph Cottle's edition of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), consolidated juvenile writing into a recognizable tradition. Taking young Romanticera writers seriously now helps us recover how many young people published and how actively their writing was discussed. Romanticism's relation to juvenility can shape new hypotheses about literary practice and offer alternative understandings of tradition: the juvenile tradition, through a proleptic sense of its own immanence, anticipates its future critical neglect but indicates the retrospection and reinterpretation that will someday remedy it.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-371
Author(s):  
Irena Yamboliev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Sentence Level

Irena Yamboliev, “Vernon Lee’s Novel Construction” (pp. 346–371) This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment,…of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

Fin-de-Siècle Salonica

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Elementary School ◽  
Primary Education ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
New Institutions

This chapter discusses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's childhood in the ancient Macedonian capital of Salonica. The future founder of the Turkish Republic was born one winter, either in 1880 or in 1881. His upbringing was more liberal than that of most lower-class Muslims. No one in his family's circle of friends and relatives, for instance, practiced polygamy. Likewise, his father reportedly drank alcohol, which was abhorred by conservatives. The confusing dualism produced in Ottoman society by the reforms of the nineteenth century had its first imprint on Mustafa when his parents entered into a heated argument about his education. There is little doubt that Mustafa Kemal's deep-seated predilection for new institutions and practices owed much to his years as one of a handful of students in the empire who had their primary education at a private elementary school devoid of a strong religious focus.

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War

This introduction explains that looming, a nineteenth-century term for a superior mirage, shows us how visions of the future war affected antebellum America. First, some spark, an event or object, captured people’s attention. Second, a unique atmosphere elevated and enlarged that spark, making it loom greater than reality. Before the Civil War was fought or remembered, it was imagined by thousands of Americans who peered at the horizon through an apocalyptic atmosphere. Third, observers focused on it and reported what appeared to be beyond the horizon. Popular forecasts rose from leaders but also women, slaves, immigrants, and common soldiers. These imaginings shaped politics, military planning, and the economy. The prologue identifies the two prevailing temporalities of antebellum America, anticipations and expectations, and calls for more historical attention to the diverse temporalities of past people.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

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