Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Edward Sugden

This introduction provides a synoptic overview of the project as a whole concentrating on how it relates to the crisis of identity in the study of the nineteenth-century Americas that has evolved in the years since 2001. It begins with an extended analysis of the overlooked second and third clauses of Moby-Dick—“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely”—and shows how they contain a model for history, geography, politics, and form, as well as how these areas relate to issues of field definition. From this close reading, it defines the central structural terms of the book, namely, the “interstitial state,” the “oceanic geoculture,” the “dissonant time,” and the “archival form.”

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.


PMLA ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
David H. Stewart

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zieliński

“Carl Spitteler and Polish-Russian Relationships in the Second Half of the Nineteenth century”This paper deals with Carl Spitteler’s opinions, still not researched and descri- bed, about Polish-Russian relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century, it focuses on the issues of the Russification of former Polish territo- ries. Spitteler had an opportunity to get acquainted in depth both with Russia and the Kingdom of Poland The author reaches interesting conclusions from close reading of a writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919.


Author(s):  
Ryan Cordell ◽  
Benjamin J. Doyle ◽  
Elizabeth Hopwood

Ryan Cordell, Benjamin Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood’s essay seizes a nineteenth-century invention, the kaleidoscope, as a model and metaphor for pedagogical practices and learning spaces that encourage play and experimentation. Through examples that involve setting letterpress type, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) encoding of nineteenth-century texts as an interpretive process, and the collaborative creation of Wikipedia pages, the authors describe how experiments with contemporary technologies help students claim scholarly agency over the texts and tools central to their study of the nineteenth century. Kaleidoscopic pedagogy encourages students to discover how C19 competencies like close reading and contemporary methods of coding and data analysis have the potential to be mutually constitutive, inspiring a more nuanced understanding of both periods.


Author(s):  
Geneviève Godbout

Throughout the colonial period, the occupants of the Betty’s Hope site relied a complex provisioning networks to obtain edible goods, tableware, and other necessities not only from the British Metropole and from local producers in Antigua but also from neighboring islands, including Guadeloupe, and from continental America. In this context, Betty’s Hope residents called upon food production and convivial hospitality were used to negotiate and stabilize their position within Antiguan society, both under slavery and after Emancipation (1834), under the particular constraints of absentee ownership and colonial trade regulations. The chapter combined the analysis of material cultural recovered at Betty’s Hope plantation with a close reading of correspondence relating to provisioning on the estate, to illustrate the enduring presence of informal trade, customary reciprocity, smuggling and illicit transactions on the estate throughout the nineteenth century.


Public ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 108-125
Author(s):  
Robert Heynen

This article examines contemporary biometric science against the backdrop of its development in nineteenth century eugenic and biostatistical practices, most notably the composite photography of Francis Galton. Focusing on automated face recognition, the article argues that contemorary biometric science is inextricable from its aesthetic investments, which in turn shape the ways in which faces and bodies are differentiated in identification systems. Based on a close reading of biometric engineering texts and projects, this aesthetico-scientific approach offers new ways of conceptualizing how biometrics constitutes rather than merely reflects bodies, and encodes racist, misogynist, and other social logics into the conception and design of technologies themselves. These are not biases that can be corrected, as ostensibly progressive biometric projects like IBM’s Diversity in Faces initiative suggest, but rather are inextricable from the biometric desire to render faces and bodies as transparent and machine-readable.


2019 ◽  
pp. 223-235
Author(s):  
Peter Templeton

Hollywood cinema offers multifaceted perspectives of the south and the southerner, guided as much by the time of production as by the personnel working on individual movies. This article will focus specifically on two films, fifteen years apart, featuring the same leading actor–James Stewart–in two similar yet distinct portrayals of southerners. The similarities and divergences between the protagonists of Winchester ’73 (1950) and Shenandoah (1965) allow us to explore (via a close reading of each text) specifically how the Confederate rebel was constructed for a national audience in the mid-twentieth century, and how that changed across a contested period that saw wide-ranging events in the battle for Civil Rights. Finally, the article shows how debts and divergences from the nineteenth century logics of white supremacy and secessionism factor into particular Hollywood discourses about geography, whiteness, and masculinity and retain an ongoing relevance in the current, fraught political climate.


Author(s):  
Christopher Wiley

This chapter outlines the proliferation of musical biography and life-writing in its multifarious forms across Europe in the long nineteenth century, and its role in establishing and perpetuating the canon, shaping the reception history of specific composers, constructing exemplary lives, providing firm foundations for the intellectual culture of the time, and maintaining a strong relationship to music history and criticism. Two case studies explore distinctive examples of “popular” manifestations of nineteenth-century music-biographical writing by influential authors to educate and entertain wide communities of autodidactic readers. This first concerns a two-volume compilation of anecdotes, surveyed for its reflection of Victorian values and musical preoccupations; the second, a collected biography whose close reading reveals much about the passive role into which women were repeatedly cast in contemporaneous life-writing on the Great Composers. A concluding section considers the extent of the impact and continued indebtedness of modern musical biography and musicology to the legacy of nineteenth-century intellectual developments.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Jane Errington

Abstract This paper explores the networks of affection, of frustration, and of obligation that continued to tie families and friends divided by the Atlantic in the first half of the nineteenth century as seen through the correspondence of two men — John Gemmill, who with his wife and 7 children emigrated to Upper Canada in the 1820s, and John Turner, who stayed home in England after his younger brother resettled in St. Andrews, New Brunswick in the 1830s. A close reading of this correspondence illustrates how kith and kin divided by the Atlantic continued to assert their place around family firesides, despite the difficulties presented by the gulf of time and space. Through their letters, correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic also negotiated often highly contested relationships that changed over time. At the same time, this link offered emigrants some reassurance of who they were and their place in the world as they negotiated new identities.


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