scholarly journals “I should like to have my name talked of in China”: Charles Lamb, China, and Shakespeare

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (35) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Yun-fang Dai
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Source Text ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Lamb

Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare played an essential role in Chinese reception history of Shakespeare. The first two adaptations in China,Xiewai qitan 澥外奇譚and Yinbian yanyu 吟邊燕語, chose Tales as the source text. To figure out why the Lambs’ Tales was received in China even earlier than Shakespeare’s original texts, this paper first focuses on Lamb’s relationship with China. Based on archival materials, it then assumes that the Lambs’ Tales might have had a chance to reach China at the beginning of the nineteenth century through Thomas Manning. Finally, it argues that the decision to first bring Shakespeare to China by Tales was made under the consideration of the Lambs’ writing style, the genre choice, the similarity of the Lambs’ and Chinese audiences, and the marketability of Tales. Tracing back to the first encounter between Tales and China throws considerable light on the reception history of Shakespeare in China. It makes sense that nothing is coincidental in the history of cultural reception and the encounters have always been fundamentally influenced by efforts from both the addresser and the receptor.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Lamb

Fuller’s books about England’s religious past helped to stimulate an outpouring of historical writing. Peter Heylyn wrote about some of the same subjects as Fuller, and so did Gilbert Burnet, Edward Stillingfleet, John Strype, and Jeremy Collier. Burnet, who looked for models for his history of the English Reformation, was sarcastic about Fuller, partly because of the latter’s “odd way of writing.” Fuller’s work was not highly regarded in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge deeply admired him for his insights and praised him for his writing. Several nineteenth-century historians defended his work. His reputation has remained uncertain, despite fresh assessments in recent years. Coleridge was remarkably apt in his viewpoint. Fuller saw the broader significance of the events he described and was one of the most sensible scholars and writers of his time.

Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

PMLA ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 114 (5) ◽  
pp. 1043-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Charles Robert Maturin ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Matthew Lewis ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
History Of

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

scholarly journals Biography and Life-Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-102
Author(s):  
Christopher Wiley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Music History ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
History And Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

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.

scholarly journals The Moor’s Political Colour: Race and Othello in Poland

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (37) ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stage Adaptations ◽  
The Way

This paper provides a brief outline of the reception history of Othello in Poland, focusing on the way the character of the Moor of Venice is constructed on the page, in the first-published nineteenth-century translation by Józef Paszkowski, and on the stage, in two twentieth-century theatrical adaptations that provide contrasting images of Othello: 1981/1984 televised Othello, dir. Andrzej Chrzanowski and the 2011 production of African Tales Based on Shakespeare, in which Othello’s part is played by Adam Ferency (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski). The paper details the political and social contexts of each of these stage adaptations, as both of them employ brownface and blackface to visualise Othello’s “political colour.” The function of blackface and brownface is radically different in these two productions: in the 1981/1984 Othello brownface works to underline Othello’s overall sense of alienation, while strengthening the existing stereotypes surrounding black as a skin colour, while the 2011 staging makes the use of blackface as an artificial trick of the actor’s trade, potentially unmasking the constructedness of racial prejudices, while confronting the audience with their own pernicious racial stereotypes.

“These Things Were Reported to Tiberius”

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Death Of Jesus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Holy City

In the late 1920s an Austrian historian of religion, Robert Eisler, introduced a riveting new theory about the trial and death of Jesus. On the strength of a dossier of Old Russian manuscripts, Eisler became convinced that Jesus went to Jerusalem shortly before his death with a cohort of “secretly armed” disciples. Once in the holy city, Eisler conjectured, Jesus and his cohort of fighters must have gained control of “the strongly fortified Temple”. It is this action which must have led to Jesus’ arrest and death. Eisler’s most momentous claim, however, is that Pilate’s notes on Jesus’ trial were rediscovered the nineteenth century and published in the early twentieth century. This chapter examines some of Eisler’s sources, and his place in the reception-history of Jesus’ Roman trial. Eisler is unique for his stress on the fascinating question of what Pilate wrote.

Nowhere Man

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-230
Author(s):  
Emily Frey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Hands On ◽  
History Of ◽  
Emotional Identification ◽  
Key Questions

Abstract In the opera that bears his name, Evgeny Onegin often seems remarkably inconsequential, a “superfluous man” among Russian society and nearly such in his own tale. Critics from Hermann Laroche to Catherine Clément have lamented not only the triviality of Evgeny's character but the flavorlessness of his music—a deficiency cast into relief by the compelling and pervasive musical presence of Tatiana, the too-eventual object of Evgeny's affections. This imbalance, a departure from Pushkin (whose Tatiana is ever sketchily drawn, and indeed almost mute), has often been attributed to Chaikovsky's well-publicized emotional identification with his heroine. Onegin's blankness thus becomes the product of a composerly flaw: Chaikovsky's inability to portray convincingly in music a character dissimilar to his own. But the Evgeny Onegin Chaikovsky inherited was not only Pushkin's. It was a cultural palimpsest, a text written on and written over by virtually every major intellectual figure in nineteenth-century Russia. By the time Chaikovsky got his hands on them, Pushkin's heroes were entangled in some of the century's most urgent debates: about the ethics of action versus reflection, the slippage between public and private identities. This article traces the constructions of Evgeny and Tatiana in a series of nineteenth- century readings of Evgeny Onegin, examining the ways in which the opera responds to and transforms key questions from the reception history of the novel. Among the texts considered are works by Herzen, Belinsky, and Dostoevsky, whose (in)famous “Pushkin Speech” was the opera's nearexact contemporary. From these readings, and the myriad images of Evgeny and Tatiana they present, emerge insights into a broader discourse about the nature of subjectivity in Europe's only autocracy.

Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time

2021 ◽  
pp. 302-340
Author(s):  
Alexander E. Bonus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Musical Time ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Performance ◽  
And Performance

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, despite being most recognized today for inventing the clockwork metronome, was one of the most famous automata showmen of the nineteenth century. This chapter begins by offering a reception history of Maelzel, the metronome, and his automata, and exploring the cultural significances underlying his clockwork creations across the Industrial Age. As numerous accounts maintain, Maelzel’s automata projected decidedly inhuman performance practices. His automata emblematized a machine culture that ran in direct opposition to the subjective ‘artistry’ championed by many skilled performers and composers over the century. This study subsequently addresses the discord between Maelzel’s age and ours regarding the values of musical time and performance practices: those metronomic qualities largely rejected by Maelzel’s musical contemporaries are often vehemently endorsed today by many professional musicians and educators who apply mechanically precise tempos and rhythms to all musical repertoires. This history ultimately confronts the veiled ‘metronome mentality’ found throughout contemporary performance culture, which neglects many musical-temporal aesthetics and rhythmic qualities from a pre-industrial, pre-metronomic past.

"Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened": Fiction, Identification, and "Benito Cereno"

2006 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-66
Author(s):  
CATHERINE TOAL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Professional Identification ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
Benito Cereno

Observing that Herman Melville's most significant fictional addition to his source text for "Benito Cereno" (the San Dominick's skeleton figurehead) reverses the terms of a trope used in the "Agatha" letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne of 13 August 1852, this article proposes that the skeleton's role in the tale converts a perhaps frustrated attempt at professional identification with Hawthorne-detectable in the scheme of semi-collaboration broached by the letter-into a dismantling of the foundations of American identification,and of the identificatory lures involved in the processes of fiction-making and fiction-reading. Although there has been considerable focus on the narrative'smanipulation of identification (particularly the snare of Delano's perspective), critics have not provided an account of the ways in which its total fictional structure, organized around the skeleton figurehead, systematically alters the meaning of its white protagonists'-and its readers'-potential affiliations. My essay attributes critical reluctance to offer such an account to the persistence of a nineteenth-century faith in the autonomous value of "sympathy" as a political resource, and to a neglect, evident in more recent,historicist analyses, of the political work that fictional artifice performs. It traces the functions and implications of "Benito Cereno"'s skeleton through an exploration of the tale's reception history, showing this history to be comprised of a series of identificatory maneuvers which in seeking to complete or add "flesh" to the fiction, are parodied or compromised by its immanent "unbuilding" of plot and narrative teleology.

scholarly journals Tried, Tested, but not Proved: The Home Cook Book and the Development of a Canadian Culinary Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-308
Author(s):  
Melissa McAfee ◽  
Ashley Shifflett McBrayne
Keyword(s):  
Food Preferences ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Cooking Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sick Children ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Content Design

This article considers the creation, publication, and reception history of The Home Cook Book, Canada’s first community and fundraising  cookbook. Published initially in Toronto in 1877 as a fundraiser for the Hospital for Sick Children, the text of the work was heavily derived from a volume of the same name issued in Chicago several years earlier. Comparison of the text of the 1877 Toronto edition with the earlier Chicago text proves many of its recipes were not Canadian in origin. As a result, the work offers a clear demonstration of how American food preferences and cooking practices came to permeate Canadian cuisine. Although its affiliation with the hospital quickly faded away, the Canadian version of The Home Cook Book remained continuously in print for fifty-two years, its content undergoing only very modest changes across that half century. We locate The Home Cook Book as a hybrid of two genres: the commercial domestic manual and the community cookbook. Our analysis combines Lynne Ireland’s and Elizabeth Driver’s frameworks for interpreting historic cookbooks as a method for understanding the impact of The Home Cook Book. With those frameworks in view, our study examines the origins of this cookbook, with particular emphasis on the influences on its content, design and development, and its publication history and reception. In particular, we focus attention on the selection and attribution of the recipes in their geographic and historical contexts, the bibliographical evidence associated with the original source text from which the cookbook derives, and the textual variations that appeared in its later iterations. In addition, the larger impact of The Home Cook Book is considered through a review of selected Canadian community cookbooks that appeared in its wake.

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