scholarly journals “Neither Dead Nor Alive:” Ukrainian Language on the Brink of Romanticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taras Koznarsky

At the end of the eighteenth century through the first decades of nineteenth century, as the last vestiges of Ukrainian autonomy were abolished, Ukrainian elites and intelligentsia embarked on a diverse range of projects (addressing geography, history, ethnography, travel writing, journalism, and literature) aimed at privileging and promoting their cultural capital within the Russian imperial field of cultural production. The Ukrainian language and its origins, nature, and status came to the fore in these projects as Ukrainian literati carefully gauged their messages for both Ukrainian and metropolitan audiences in order to engage playfully and polemically with imperial perceptions of Ukraine and to further the cause of the Ukrainian language as a distinctive linguistic system, cultural legacy, and literary medium. These often cautious and purposefully ambiguous characterizations, classifications, and applications prepared the ground for the romantic generation of writers who dramatically expanded the stylistic and generic range of Ukrainian in their literary works and translations, and forcefully argued for the language’s autonomy, dignity, and expressive potential. While early romantic Ukrainian writings were seen as colourful linguistic and ethnographic regional variants useful for the development of Russian imperial and national culture, the growth of Ukrainian literature alarmed both Russian critics and administrators, who began to see in these developments not only unproductive and anachronistic vexations, but also a culturally and ideologically subversive agenda that had to be discouraged. By surveying and examining diverse classifications and discussions of the Ukrainian language by Ukrainian and Russian literati, the article questions the limits of so-called “Ukrainophilia” in Russian imperial culture of the early nineteenth century.

Author(s):  
James Moore

The impact of William Roscoe’s circle in Liverpool is re-examined and, in particular, his particular interpretation of the ‘Florentine model’ which continued to be so influential in the city in the early nineteenth century. The chapter explores the various manifestations of this cultural legacy and, in particular, the development of key art institutions and associations. While these were important in promoting Liverpool as a centre of high culture, they also limited the cultural perspective of Liverpool’s merchant class and created an essentially elitist view about the purpose of cultural capital assembly.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Cynthia Roman

Abstract Focusing on A smoking club (1793/7) by James Gillray, this essay presents satiric representations of smoking clubs in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British prints, arguing that they reflect and mediate contemporary understandings of tobacco as an intoxicant in British associational life. The breadth of potential cultural connotations – from political and social parody to light-hearted humour – is traced through the content and imagery of selected prints. These prints rely on the familiarity of contemporary audiences with political and social knowledge, as well as a visual iconography iconically realized in William Hogarth's A midnight modern conversation (1732).


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


Author(s):  
Margaret Williamson

This chapter considers the renaming of enslaved people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using plantation records and narrative accounts, it focuses on the classical names that made up 10–15% of inventory listings. Those who renamed newly acquired slaves after powerful historical and mythological figures from antiquity added a cruel irony to the physical practices of enslavement. They also laid claim to the cultural capital of high European culture, while mocking those denied access to it. But their claim was bogus, resting on the physical and legal power to enslave rather than on any deep knowledge of antiquity. The claim to civilizational and racial purity that underpinned it was also undercut by new meanings, including the perceptions of the enslaved: deployed in the service of racial purity, Classics became creolized. The implications can be traced in an early-nineteenth-century Johnny Newcome print and in the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt.


Author(s):  
William Tullett

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.


2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Doron Avraham

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.


Author(s):  
C. H. Alexandrowicz

The historian of international law attempting an inquiry into the law of recognition of States and governments during its formative stage, particularly into eighteenth-century sources, is bound to consult the first historical survey of the literature of the law of nations by D. H. L. Ompteda, published in 1785. Ompteda referred to problems of recognition under the general heading of the fundamental right of nations to freedom and independence. All the essays he mentioned as being directly or indirectly relevant to problems of recognition of new States or rulers were written by comparatively unknown authors. Among them, Justi and Steck were perhaps the most active participants in the first attempts to formulate a theory of recognition. This chapter considers these early attempts, in particular the direct influence of Justi and Steck on Martens and Klueber, and through them on Henry Wheaton and some of the early nineteenth-century writers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naofumi Abe

Abstract The middle of the eighteenth century reportedly witnessed the emergence of the new literary movement in Persian poetry, called the “bāzgasht-e adabi,” or literary return, which rejected the seventeenth-century mainstream Indian or tāza-guʾi style. This literary movement recently merits increased attention from many scholars who are interested in wider Persianate cultures. This article explores the reception of this movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Iran and the role played by the Qajar royal court in it, mainly by the analysis of a specific sub-genre of tazkeras, called “royal-commissioned tazkeras,” which were produced from the reign of the second Qajar monarch Fath-ʿAli Shāh onward. A main focus will be on the reciprocal relationship between the court poets/literati and the shah, which presumably somehow affected our understanding of Persian literature today.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.


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